After Exposing T.C. Schmidt’s Oxford Apologetics for the Testimonia Flaviana altogether (and his fellow Christians failed to rescue him), I now shall address his appendix on my case against Josephus referring to the Christian Jesus when relating the execution of a certain “James, brother of Jesus.” For those who want to catch up on my case, it was first published a decade ago in the Journal of Early Christian Studies (available now in Hitler Homer Bible Christ), but summarized in Historicity of Jesus and expanded in Obsolete Paradigm. Those are really the only places to consult if you want to engage with all the evidence and argument, but you can get a quick summary in Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014.

Here I will advance the thesis that Schmidt is lying through his teeth. But I acknowledge that every single example I will present here of him spinning false narratives could be explained alternatively by Schmidt being extraordinarily incompetent. So you, the reader, can choose your adventure: either Schmidt is wrong because he’s a liar, or he’s wrong because of a catastrophic cascade of mistakes. Either way, he’s wrong. I just personally don’t buy the latter hypothesis at this point. But maybe that’s just me.

My Case in Sum

What is Schmidt supposed to be disproving here?

The Antiquities of Josephus was published in the 90s A.D. But the phrase “called Christ” is beyond any reasonable doubt an accidental interpolation of a scholar’s marginal note that must have occurred in the 3rd century, after Origen and before or by the time of Eusebius. Originally this was a story about the brother of another Jesus, the son of Damneus. And we can know this because (and here I’m just summarizing; I’ve made a detailed case for each point elsewhere, as cited above):

• This passage was unknown to Origen.
• And to all other Christian writers on James for three hundred years.
• Eusebius is the first to “discover” it in the early fourth century.
• Origen instead mistook a story about James in Hegesippus as being in Josephus.
• A story that shows no awareness at all of this one.
• Had Origen seen this one, he’d have described it correctly or quoted it (see next).
• So would Hegesippus. But he never heard of this story in Josephus either.
• Even Schmidt admits their “similar-sounding names were often mistaken” (p. 238).
• And Origen sometimes confused authors like this (HHBC, p. 362).
• Moreover, while Origen knew where Josephus mentioned John the Baptist, saying so in the same place he falsely attributes to Josephus this other passage about James (“for Josephus in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities bears witness that John was a Baptist,” Against Celsus 1.47), he did not know where any of this material about James was (he conspicuously fails to identify what book it’s in), supporting the conclusion that he couldn’t actually find it there.

Plus:

• Acts used Josephus yet never noticed this passage either, despite being perfect for its agenda.
• (And even if Acts predates Josephus, how could Josephus know this story but not the author of Acts?)
• Josephus would have explained things; only a Christian would forget to (see next).
• Josephus always conspicuously avoids using the word “Christ.”
• Whereas the inserted words (“called Christ”) are a canonical Christian phrase.
• And they resemble a marginal note, not a Josephan commentary.
• And making, and accidentally interpolating, marginal notes was very common.
• As was replacing a duplication with a note, and “son of Damneus” here would have looked like a duplication from a few lines down to any scribe who thought “called Christ” was a correction rather than a note.
• But that also need not have been the case, as a competent reader would already understand the Jesus referred to here is the one concluding the story: this James’s killer was punished by being replaced by his brother.

And now:

• Many peer reviewed studies agree: see Nicholas Allen, “Josephus on James the Just? A Re-Evaluation of Antiquitates Judaicae 20.9.1,” Chris Hansen, “Jesus’ Historicity and Sources: The Misuse of Extrabiblical Sources for Jesus and a Suggestion,” Nicholas List, “The Death of James the Just Revisited,” and (indirectly) Margaret Williams; also now Hansen, “Josephus and the Murder of James: An Argument Against Some Common Wisdom” (on which see Hansen’s Contribution to the James in Josephus Debate).

The incongruence of what Origen thinks is true with what we now find in Josephus is alone enough to prove this, while all the other evidence just listed only further proves it. All these observations are unlikely (most are very unlikely) on any other theory. Indeed, had Origen known of the James passage that we have then:

• He would not have said Josephus connected the fall of Jerusalem to the killing of James. Only Hegesippus does that (Josephus instead connected it to the killing of Ananus, either the one in this very story or his father).
• He would not have said “Josephus” called him James “the Just” (because he didn’t; Hegesippus did).
• Or that “the people” named him that (because Josephus never says that either; Hegesippus did).

And instead, Origen would have used the actual material in Josephus against Celsus—had he known of it:

• It says, exactly as Origen would have wanted to say against Celsus, that the Jewish and Roman elite all agreed the killing of a Christian—indeed the very brother of Jesus himself—was wrong and to be punished, not endorsed.
• It says, exactly as Origen would have wanted to say against Celsus, that Ananus only killed Christians because he was particularly cruel and adhered to a small misguided and unjust Jewish sect.
• And it says, exactly as Origen would have wanted to say against Celsus, that Josephus agreed with this assessment and thus did not deem Christians worthy of such animus. 

All three points would have been a rhetorical coup for Origen against Celsus, and precisely the kind of praise any apologist would want to boast of in favor of his sect and its hero. Yet Origen is completely unaware of these details. Which entails he never read this passage in Josephus as we have it (unless he came across it later and wondered whether it might be related; but that would not be relevant to the present point, as in Against Celsus he clearly had not yet thought of that).

And finally, discourse style slams the dunk:

• Josephus would have to explain what a “Christ” was and where else he discussed it and why that mattered to anything he was saying here—exactly as he does in this same passage with “Sadducee,” a less obscure term, yet he re-explains why that word is here, and references where he previously explained it. Only a Christian would forget the need of this.
• Josephus would have to explain why Christians are being targeted and killed. This is not even explained in the TF (the Testimonium Flavianum, where no mention of such a thing ever appears), but even had it been, Josephus would reference that fact, and if it had not been, he would provide the explanation here. Only a Christian would forget the need of this.
• Likewise why all the elite, both Jewish and Roman, are outraged that Christians are being killed, indeed even the brother of the one supposedly executed by the Romans. He seems instead to think the crimes of James are irrelevant, and it was all just a dispute over administrative court procedure and the prosecutor just being a dick and being impeached for it.

And on top of all that, Josephus doesn’t specify whether James is a biological rather than a cultic brother of this Jesus, and we don’t know Josephus even knew (or cared) that all Christians were brothers of the Lord. So we can’t establish Josephus would even know that James might not be a literal brother of Jesus, or would make a point of it even had he known (since a brother was a brother, as ten studies now show: OPH, pp. 349–50). So even if the passage was written exactly as we have it, we still cannot use it to establish anything about Jesus anyway, since we cannot tell whether Josephus knew or cared whether this was a biological brother of Jesus. Neither does he back-reference to the Testimonium Flavianum to confirm knowledge of a historical Jesus here. It’s just all the worse that we can already be sure Josephus didn’t write the “Christ” part anyway. So it’s all moot.

Okay. So that’s the case Schmidt needs to overcome. What do we get?

Schmidt’s Case

He starts with “it does not seem like anything that would have been accidentally or intentionally interpolated by an early Christian” because it’s “an ambiguous turn of phrase” that “communicates a distant or skeptical portrayal of Jesus.” Not only is neither of those statements true, I also refuted both arguments, with evidence, in the study he is supposed to be responding to. The phrase tou legomenou Christou looks exactly like the kind of marginal notes Christians made, and is exactly a common Christian phrase—not a Josephan one. It communicated no skepticism at all. It was repeatedly used reverently of Jesus. Ignoring all the evidence refuting him and just repeating the refuted arguments is dishonest: Schmidt is making it appear as if these are correct statements when they are not, and as if they have no rebuttal, when they do. Hiding the truth is lying. And once a liar, always a liar. You now know you can never trust Schmidt to tell you the truth. Which of course I already extensively proved last time. But here we go again. Only context can make this commonplace clause “distant or skeptical,” and none here does.

Schmidt’s next argument is that Gentile Christians didn’t admit James was a brother of Jesus, and therefore only Josephus would. This is a lie. The interpolator could have been a Jewish Christian anyway, refuting Schmidt’s argument conceptually from the start. But we have no need of that hypothesis. Because Schmidt’s claim is false. Gentile Christians routinely admitted James was a brother of Jesus (as even Schmidt has to later admit on pp. 242–43)—many even literally, and even those who meant it nonliterally (like Origen himself repeatedly does) would not be excluded here, as this passage does not say it was meant either way, so neither Christian perspective is affirmed or excluded by it.

What we have here is literally canonical (as is the spuriously added “called Christ”). Thus Schmidt’s second argument is, fundamentally, bullshit. It’s just worse that the words “brother of Jesus” were not written by a Christian anyway, but by Josephus; and attaching the brief gloss “the one called Christ” was an earnest insertion of a marginal note believed to be accidentally omitted text (and thus believed by that scribe to have been written by a non-Christian Jew). And Origen had no trouble calling James the brother of Jesus, over and over again, just like this. So Schmidt’s second argument doesn’t even make logical sense. It literally ignores what the actual hypothesis is that he is supposed to be rebutting, pretending that hypothesis doesn’t exist. Which sinks his case.

Schmidt’s third argument is that Origen’s account “exactly matches the distinct phrasing of the more modest account of James present in all manuscripts” of Josephus. This is another lie. And it’s like all the lies I think Schmidt tells throughout his book—as for example how he lies about the argument of Ken Olson by “omitting” Olson’s actual data from it, the data that proves Olson right and not Schmidt. This is similar. Because the phrase “the brother of Jesus” is not distinct. It is entirely generic, and distinctive of no author. It therefore is not evidence that one author is quoting another. Any author who described a James who was the brother of a Jesus would use those words. Origen need never have even seen those words in Josephus to have formed that phrase. By contrast—and again, this was in my original study that Schmidt read, so he knows it’s there but conceals it from you here, pretending there is no refutation of what he just said, which, again, looks a lot like lying to me—what is distinctive about Josephus’s passage is the awkward indirect clause “the name for whom was James.” Guess what isn’t in Origen? Yep: any actually distinctive link to Josephus’s passage, like this. Origen identifies James in a perfectly generic and ordinary way grammatically (and he places the name of James before and not, like Josephus, after naming Jesus). And this demonstrates that he is not quoting Josephus. Schmidt hides this crucial fact from you and tells you the opposite.

Even the placement of the gloss (“the one called Christ”) directly after “Jesus” is not distinctive, as that’s always where any author or scribe would place it. Origen and a later interpolator would have done this even apart from each other, so it requires no coincidence. It’s an inevitable string of words. But that a scribe working in Origen’s library in Caesarea (where I proved this happened) would place it there following Origen is even more expected. In other words, we know a scribe in his library after him added the marginal note—or even he did, after publishing Against Celsus, and then struggling to find the passage he thought was in Josephus, perhaps even after a reader asked him where it was; though the same query would inspire anyone managing that library’s manuscripts to do the same.

So whoever it was, it doesn’t matter: either way the annotator deliberately had in mind Origen’s exact phrasing when adding that note (which phrasing Origen constructed by simply appending Matthew 1:16 to a paraphrase of Galatians 1:19, a passage that Origen even references when he brings this up). And whoever then mistook that note for a correction and “reinserted” it was also in that library and thus also likely aware of Origen’s wording and thus would even be inspired by that knowledge to think surely this was accidentally omitted text. (I will admit this could also have been deliberately done by Eusebius, hoping that his own transposition of “called Christ” from Origen to Josephus would look like other manuscripts had accidentally omitted it, being just three words easy to miss, and thus he could credibly sell that as the original reading.)

Schmidt ignores all of this, pretends none of it exists or was never argued, and thus generates a bogus apologetic instead of a credible argument. Do you see a trend yet? Obviously he’s just wrong, about everything he is saying, repeatedly. But why? Well, you know what I think. But there are only two possibilities: this is all a deliberate scam; or Schmidt is really, really bad at this.

That completes Schmidt‘s own “positive” case for authenticity (pp. 231–35). And it sure looks dishonest to me. He says Christians wouldn’t say “the one called Christ.” But they do; a lot, and reverently. Origen even especially liked the phrase. So that’s a lie. He says a Christian like Origen would never call James Jesus’s “brother.” Except he does. A lot. So did their scriptures; repeatedly. And so did every other Christian discussing it, even those who claimed James was only a half-brother or fictive brother (and our passage is compatible with all of the above). So that’s another lie. He then says Origen quotes distinctive material from Josephus. He does not. So that’s yet another lie. Again, Schmidt’s case is just all lies—or bone-headed mistakes, if you’re charitable. Either way, his every premise, and thus conclusion, is false. He’s simply wrong.

Schmidt then spends time debunking the theory that the entire James passage is an interpolation (pp. 235–40), which I won’t comment on because he’s right. Even if his arguments are specious and feeble here, I agree a sound case can be made that that is not a plausible hypothesis. The only hypothesis that is plausible and confirmed by a lot of evidence (as I just surveyed) is that a marginal note that read “the one called Christ” added after Origen published Against Celsus was accidentally inserted into the passage in that same library sometime before Eusebius published our edition of his History of the Church, and not that the whole passage was forged. And as I proved, all extant manuscripts of Josephus are descendants of that same manuscript produced or used by Eusebius, with evidence even beyond what I present in The End of the Arabic Testimonium (which is contrary to Schmidt’s dishonest claim, on p. 243, that I am only “conjecturing” this: I most definitely prove it, with evidence: HHBC, pp. 340–44). So that’s why we don’t have any copies from before this Caesarean edition of Eusebius—not even in quotation.

Schmidt’s Response to My Case

He first attempts a rebuttal to Ken Olson’s case (that the whole “brother of” clause was interpolated: pp. 240–43) which I suspect is as dishonest as his treatment of Olson elsewhere, but since I don’t defend that theory (I think only “called Christ” was interpolated), I’ll skip over most of that. I would just ask anyone who wants to review that side-quest to compare Olson’s actual arguments with Schmidt’s distortions of them before judging the matter. Schmidt then gets to my case last (pp. 243–47). Nevertheless, I will quickly go over the overlapping arguments between myself and Olson and the irrelevance of Schmidt’s replies to them.

• Olson is concerned that we lack manuscripts by which to establish authenticity. Schmidt incompetently makes this an apologetical farce about how many manuscripts we have (compare my point about this unscholarly tactic in Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). In fact, as I argue, it’s about our having no manuscript we can establish as independent of the ones Eusebius published. So we cannot “see” what the text said before that (as I noted last time).
• Olson points out (as I do) that Josephus not only never uses the word messiah (one of the meanings of the Greek word christos), but he specifically avoids ever using it when describing men he definitely understood (and knew his Jewish readers would understand) were messiahs (a point I also covered last time, but for the evidence see OPH, pp. 52, 365). And he would always have explained (or cross-referenced) such an obscure word had he ever gone against his own trend to use it anyway (exactly as he did for “Sadducee” here, with both an explanation of its relevance to the story and a cross-reference). Schmidt disingenuously tries to argue that this point is “refuted” by the fact that Josephus uses christos “to refer to a building that was anointed or smeared with a substance.” That isn’t even relevant to our argument.
• Worse, Schmidt contradicts himself by arguing Josephus would use the word “Christ” here because “Josephus would have felt the need to explain” the name “Christian” (p. 241, n. 73). But that is precisely what he does not do here. So Schmidt is now supporting Olson’s argument, not rebutting it—because the word “Christian” is not in the text; nor any explanation (or cross-reference explaining) why the word “Christ” is here. Not only does “Josephus” not explain what that word means (even the Testimonium Flavianum doesn’t do that; which evinces a Christian, and not Josephus, wrote it), he does not explain why it’s relevant to mention here—since he connects none of the story to it, nor references where anything he said elsewhere would explain it; nor does anything in the Testimonium Flavianum explain it here either, as the TF also does not mention Jesus having brothers, their being Christians, or anyone wanting to kill Christians, or the entire elite supporting Christians against them, or what the word “Christ” means. So Schmidt’s entire argument here makes no sense.
• Olson notes that, by contrast, “the one called Christ” is a common, even canonical, Christian phrase. Schmidt tries to answer this by suggesting “the phrase is quite distant and possibly skeptical” (p. 241) but that’s already refuted by Olson’s argument and examples (which I also supply), showing that it was routinely used by Christians without any distance or skepticism (Origen indeed was himself especially fond of it—and not skeptically as Schmidt falsely represents on p. 242). So here Schmidt is just lying about the data. Again.
• Indeed, Olson cited the glorifying Nativity text of Matthew where that exact phrase first appears (and thus Matthew has Pilate repeat it as irony, not skepticism). Schmidt tries to make this go away but with no logical sense (p. 243). It is simply an obvious phrase Origen or one of his students would use to mark a brief note in the margins. They don’t require “context” for this because it’s just a note, and to themselves, so they know what the context is. As would the scribe who mistook it as omitted text. That’s why they never add an explanation for why this word is there: Unlike Josephus, Christians take their own beliefs for granted. Hence they simply thought this is what the text must have said because that’s all that was indicated in the margin as omitted. They obviously were not inclined to “invent” anything to justify its being there. They just put it in. And that explains all the oddities of this text. Schmidt has no response to this, our actual argument.

That then leaves my study in the Journal of Early Christian Studies (Schmidt inexplicably ignores its expansion in On the Historicity of Jesus and corroboration by Lataster, List, Allen, and Hansen, all cited above). And Schmidt never articulates my case there, such that anyone reading his rebuttal can really know what my argument was. Instead he just snipes at random tidbits of it, as illogically or disingenuously as usual.

Do we have any manuscripts with a pre-Eusebian text?

First, he tries desperately to “get back” some manuscript evidence that doesn’t exist:

• Schmidt claims my proof (none of which Schmidt ever mentions or responds to or even admits exists) that all extant versions derive from those used or published by Eusebius is “refuted” by there being a medieval Latin translation by Cassiodorus (p. 243). But he never explains why anyone should believe that is not a translation of this same textual tradition. All my presented evidence proves that it is. In fact, scholars agree that Latin translation cross-translated from Eusebius and thus did not even rely solely on manuscripts of the Antiquities. But the latter would have been Eusebius’s edition anyway.
• Schmidt also tries to argue that some versions of Eusebius differ from some versions of the extant Antiquities, but that is not relevant to my case, which accounts for that better than the alternative. Schmidt “forgets” to mention here that Eusebius’s quotations diverge from each other (as he quotes the Testimonium Flavianum in three different books). And at least one exactly matches what we now have in the Antiquities (see, for example, The End of the Arabic Testimonium).
• Schmidt also confuses the claim that all quotations derive from Eusebius’s manuscripts of the Antiquities with quotations that derive from Eusebius’s own books. Schmidt seems not to realize that I proved the manuscripts of the Antiquities that we have all came from him, not just that all quotes of it are of him. So, for example, Photius’s summary of the Antiquities will obviously be a summary of a descendant of one of the manuscripts of it that was published by Eusebius.
• Schmidt also seems not to be aware that Eusebius will have published multiple copies of the Antiquities, not just one (Eusebius was specifically tasked by Constantine as a Christian publisher). And we cannot know what variants those copies produced, if Eusebius was already creating his own variants across his quotations in three different books (which will also have been published many times and thus acquire yet more variants from copying).

So Schmidt simply has no argument here. He is really just erasing my argument and all its data, and making false claims about other data supposedly countering it, when it already accounted for it. This is a very typical method of lying that I documented across Schmidt’s entire book. You simply won’t know what my argument and evidence really is from reading Schmidt. And when you read my actual argument and evidence, you will scratch your head at what Schmidt could possibly be thinking with his attempts at rebuttal. I obviously have my own opinion about what he was thinking. But no credible opinion rescues his case. It just provides a different explanation for why it fails.

There is just no way this can work. It’s all specious apologetics, not real scholarship. It isn’t taking the evidence seriously, while making-up illogical just-so stories in its place. Taking the evidence seriously leads to only one conclusion: all extant quotations of these passages derive either from one of Eusebius’s books (most commonly his final edition of the History of the Church but some possibly come from earlier editions, or possibly the Demonstration and Theophany; and all three will have existed in many copies with inevitable variants) or a manuscript of the Antiquities that descended from one of the many that Eusebius will have published (which also could have had variant readings among them). And there is no way to prove otherwise in any known case.

The TF and James interpolation simply arise after Origen published and before Eusebius did, in the same library, and are found in all manuscripts of the Antiquities since. So it all comes from that library. We have confirmed no quotes or copies come from any earlier edition, despite scouring the world to find some. And that’s simply that. There is no honest way around this.

Which explanation is simpler and better evidenced?

Next Schmidt tries to argue that the convoluted and unevidenced theory that Origen “merged” the accounts in Hegesippus and Josephus is “the simplest way to explain” all the evidence (p. 244). But that is literally impossible. A single commonplace correction made to one manuscript of the Antiquities that all extant versions derive from is inherently simpler than the bizarre idea that Origen “garbled up” two different accounts in his head and completely failed to include any distinctive detail from one of them but several from the other—plus all the other epicycles Schmidt has to invent to “explain away” all the evidence bulleted above. That’s a whole keystone-cops sequence of events, improbability upon improbability upon improbability. It’s even less credible that Origen would garble them on purpose; so Schmidt has to claim this was just some monumental, inexplicable mistake Origen made, a kind of mistake we have no examples of and is hard to imagine even being possible. Whereas a vastly simpler mistake for him to have made is to have merely misremembered who he was summarizing, like I show he tended to do. So Schmidt has no proper concept of theoretical simplicity here. This is just armchair apologetics, right up there with “surely it’s simpler to suppose dinosaur fossils have sharp teeth so they could eat coconuts.”

Schmidt’s convoluted theory isn’t even simpler than the replacement correction I propose (seeing “Jesus son of Damneus” as a duplication from a few lines down and the marginal note as its replacement is a widely documented kind of scribal error). But it can’t even in principle be simpler than the mere correction I also propose (that “called Christ” was simply inserted into a story that Josephus meant the reader to already understand referred to the Jesus who otherwise appears suddenly in it a few lines down). Indeed the mere correction theory is self-explaining (the absence of the duplicated moniker would make it easier for a scribe or even annotator to mistake this as the story Origen was referring to, despite containing none of its distinct details) while the replacement correction theory is also self-explaining, as the duplicated line would then cause the event: perceiving duplicated lines as an error was common, and perceiving marginal notes as a correction for them was also common, so the existence of the duplication provides a ready and common explanation for the error, just as the absence of duplication would in a different way.

In simple Bayesian terms, all the evidence I bulleted above is only probable on either of those theories, not on Schmidt’s “garbling two accounts while somehow completely leaving out one of them,” or any other theory. So there is no way for Schmidt to rescue his complex garbling theory. It has no favorable prior probability (that’s simply not a documented kind of mistake Origen made, and it requires too many moving parts to all fall in place for it to have happened contrary to known trends and still leave all the evidence as we have it) and it has no favorable likelihood, because it predicts different observations than we find.

On priors, my theory rests entirely on well-established precedents in scribal behavior and requires only three simple and commonplace stages: that Origen confused Hegesippus for Josephus (a simple and documented mistake, and well supported by evidence in this case), that he or someone in his library tried to find it in Josephus and briefly annotated the only candidate they would have found (also a simple and common mistake, and also supported by evidence in this case), and that someone then mistook that for accidentally omitted text sometime before Eusebius published (another simple and documented mistake, again supported by evidence in this case). So Schmidt cannot gain in prior probability. Even when we fix the prior probability to the frequency that we empirically observe for interpolation across Christian literature (which is between 1 in 10 and 1 in 1000), that would be no lower than the frequency of his bewildering explanation and the conjunction of all its required epicycles.

Then on likelihoods, Schmidt’s theory tanks on every prediction:

• Schmidt’s theory predicts there should be distinctive components from the Josephan account in Origen, and not just Hegesippan details. We observe the opposite.
• It predicts the Josephan passage should look different than it does. It should contain all the expected explanations, like what a “Christ” is and why it’s relevant to the story and why any of what the story depicts is happening, like why Christians are being killed and their killing opposed—all matching Josephan discourse style, and not Christian assumptions. We observe the opposite.
• It predicts the Hegesippan account should also be more similar—because explaining why his account should so pervasively contradict the earlier Josephan account requires stacking epicycles of suppositions beyond my mere simple three. Yet we again observe the opposite.
• It predicts we should have the Josephan account rhetorically exploited in Acts. Yet we observe the opposite.
• It predicts the word “Christ” should not be in the Josephan account but something more plausible for him to have said (like Jesus the son of Joseph, or Jesus “the wise man I mentioned in a previous volume,” etc.). We observe the opposite.
• And it predicts that Origen would have made considerable rhetorical hay out of the choice content of even our Josephan passage he could not possibly have “forgotten,” including that it shows that the Roman and Jewish elite, and even Josephus, sided with Christians, and condemned their persecution as cruel and unjust.
• It even predicts that Origen would not garble these accounts in the first place, but would sooner (more likely) describe them distinctly, and correctly attribute each component to its corresponding version (just as Eusebius later would).

And:

• Schmidt’s theory predicts—even if with less certainty, but to at least some differential—that if “Christ” were included in Josephus’s explanation, it would not exactly match a canonical Christian glorifying verse; and that more authors should have correctly reported the Josephan account before Eusebius.

Schmidt’s convoluted “garble” theory is simply the worst theory possible for making what we observe altogether likely. Which makes his case for it specious apologetics—a mere exercise in rhetoric, forcing a result to match desire, not real scholarship, which honestly admits the significance of the evidence and the actual assumptions required to get it.

Specious Rhetoric vs. Evidence-Based Reasoning

We get a clear glimpse of this fact when Schmidt confusedly tries to rhetorically argue (on p. 244) against my expectation that Origen should have quoted or used distinct material from Josephus had Origen actually seen it, by saying this “does not square with Carrier’s point that Origen confused Hegesippus with Josephus.” Evidently, Schmidt has confused which theory is which, mistaking what I show would be observed if Origen had not confused them, for what would be the case if he had. Obviously I do not think “Origen should have quoted or used distinct material from Josephus” if he confused Hegesippus for Josephus. That’s exactly what my confusion theory explains—that Origen didn’t do this because he didn’t see this passage in Josephus. He merely thought what he remembered from Hegesippus had been in Josephus—just as I show he misremembered material in the Protevangelion of James as also being in Josephus. I am thus showing why my theory is simpler and better explains the evidence. Schmidt’s “rebuttal” tells us that he doesn’t even understand the argument I am making, or why the evidence confirms it. He just blindly stumbles into illogical rhetoric instead—because he isn’t doing real scholarship here. He’s running lazy armchair apologetics.

We see this again when (also on p. 244) Schmidt tries giving the false impression that “Origen did mention the passage from Josephus’ Antiquities 20.200″ because Origen preceded the suspect passage with “Flavius Josephus, when writing the Jewish Antiquities in twenty books,” thus (presumably) identifying the passage. But that’s conspicuously what Origen did not do here. This is actually evidence that Origen did not know where he thought this passage was in Josephus, because he could not identify what book it was in. He just plopped in that the Antiquities comes in twenty volumes; not that Origen was using material from the twentieth volume. The first person to say it’s in that volume is Eusebius. Which tells us when it appeared in volume twenty: after Origen, and by the time of Eusebius; and where it first appeared: as this entails it entered the text at that Christian Library of Caesarea. So the evidence is actually the opposite of what Schmidt claims, and proves the opposite theory. Schmidt hides this under convoluted rhetoric, so someone not savvy enough won’t catch the trick here being played.

We get more of Schmidt’s rhetoric in place of evidence-based reasoning when he tries to argue (on p. 245) that “Acts seems to close its narrative before the death of James anyway” so couldn’t have mentioned it, which is both false (it ends around that very same time) and irrelevant, since the point is that the author of Acts would not have ended his book without mentioning this event, because it exactly matches the entire agenda of Acts: to depict the Romans and even some Jewish elite as kindly disposed toward Christians, even punishing their persecutors, and to depict their only enemies as excessively legalistic Jews. This story is perfect for selling that agenda—had it been in Josephus at the time. So, clearly, it could not have been. Schmidt is thus “making up” reasons to dismiss obvious facts.

Here, again, Schmidt has no honest point to make against this conclusion. Even his weird assertion that Acts avoids narrating the deaths of Peter and Paul “therefore” it would avoid the death of James is illogical: the reason for including this James story is how it fits the author’s agenda in Acts—whereas we have no evidence the fates of Paul and Peter did, and even some evidence they didn’t, so we cannot cross the same reasoning over from them to James (we also don’t know when they died, or that the author of Acts even knew either story yet so as to tell it); and empirically, Acts does reference the execution of the leading apostle James. It just doesn’t at all agree with any later account, or seem at all aware of the narratively useful death of any other James. Which is, again, inexplicable on Schmidt’s theory of this text, as then he would know. So both facts and logic sink Schmidt’s apologetic here, leaving us again with mere rhetoric, not serious argument. (I’ll set aside Schmidt’s merely apologetic dismissal of the fact that Acts used the Antiquities as a source—that is decisively certain and not honestly dismissable.)

All of Schmidt’s remaining arguments are just the same literarily erroneous stuff I already addressed from others before, replacing evidence with just-so stories (see More Asscrankery from Tim O’Neill and Reading Josephus on James and Mason on Josephus on James). Which is the behavior of a disingenuous (or desperate) apologist, not a serious scholar. But it also includes lots of nonsense like that Josephus would ever just inexplicably name someone and assume you remember him from a previous volume. Josephus doesn’t do that. When someone or something is discussed only once two whole volumes before, he explains which volume, or that it is in a previous volume, as he does with the word “Sadducee” in this very same passage. He does not assume you will “remember” reading about some obscure thing in a whole other book. But he does assume you can pick up which person he means by the ensuing story of only a few lines, as here. And of course, as I noted, we need not assume that. It is just as likely that the corrector mistook the duplicated “son of Damneus” as an error rather than intentional and the marginal note as the text meant to replace it, because that is a common mistake well documented in scribal practice. So it often happened. And we cannot rule it out here. To the contrary, the evidence is all what we expect if either mistake happened, and not something else.

And finally, Schmidt’s claim that this story would on my reading entail “various clans of High Priests were plotting to murder one another,” before Josephus said a general “sedition” arose among the High Priests, is likewise specious. That isn’t the story Josephus is telling. James was not “murdered” but tried and executed for a crime everyone agreed he committed. Because the objection Josephus describes was not to his being innocent, but the application of the law being too fastidious, and in violation of administrative procedure. Obviously priests were not exempt from the law, so it will always have been the case that occasionally some would get convicted and executed for a crime. So the story Josephus tells is not about ongoing murders.

Josephus is describing a new and alarming escalation: Ananus the Cruel executing James without a properly convened court; then the elite deposed him for this and attempted to prevent a resulting feud by assuaging the aggrieved family by appointing to replace Ananus none other than his victim’s brother, Jesus; followed by Ananus the Elder attempting to calm things down further with financial settlements with that same Jesus (in the very next paragraph). This is part of an entire narrative of escalating conflict in the High Priesthood that later ends in outright “sedition” years later. So Schmidt is simply ignoring what this story actually depicts, and its context and purpose in Josephus’s narrative. And instead invents a false narrative about this story and its context in place of the real story and context. Which is another example of his erasing data and replacing it with fake data, just like I caught him doing again and again and again across his whole book.

Remove the fake data, put back in the real data, and you get the opposite conclusion.

Star Example: “Everyone Loved Christians!”

Another example of this armchair rhetoric is when Schmidt tries to make the evidence go away by claiming that “by Josephus’ day Christianity had not been declared illegal in the Roman Empire, and we have no idea how many people at this time ‘hated’ Christians let alone whether Josephus and his readership would have been among them” and therefore we should “not” expect Josephus to have had to explain any of the weird things going on in this story had it been about Christians. This is not only false (itself an example of two-faced Christian apologetics, where they rewrite history to its opposite and back again whenever it suits them), but it doesn’t even respond to my argument regarding what Origen would do with this passage (by which time the rhetorical value of this passage against Celsus would be too immense to omit) or why Josephus would have said more about all this.

Because Schmidt is not just assuming Christians were legal and tolerated by Romans and Jews in the 90s AD (and it all went sour suddenly thereafter, a strange ad hoc view agreed by literally no one), but that Christianity was so widely known and beloved that Josephus would not have to explain why anyone would be killing them or the elite defending them. But that’s illogical. If they were loved, why are they being killed? If they are being legally condemned in a court of law, why are they loved? Either has to be explained. Just as the role of Ananus being a Sadducee did. But neither is the case. Christians were barely known at all (even Pliny the Elder didn’t know anything about them, other than that they were regarded for some unknown reason as criminals, and not popularly liked). So everything in Josephus’s story would still all have to be explained. Only a Christian would be assuming the apologetic narrative of Acts that this matches and thus not be surprised by any of it. All other readers would be perplexed at what James being a Christian had to do with either his persecution or support—or even that James was a Christian, since merely calling his brother a messiah did nothing by itself to establish that. In other words, Schmidt’s apologetics here is nonsensical and impotent. It doesn’t change any of my evidence or any of its likelihoods.

And that’s even apart from the fact that Schmidt’s armchair fabrication about Christian popularity is not even in any way true. Schmidt is aware Tacitus contradicts it. But he claims the passage in Tacitus says the Christians were only hated in the 60s AD and beloved thereafter. But that is not what Tacitus says. This is more lying. That crowds seeing them tortured had pity on them did not change the fact that everyone hated them; it was in spite of it. Tacitus makes clear they were “hated for their abominations” and practiced “a most mischievous superstition” that was “evil” and “hideous and shameful.” He does not say that opinion of them ever changed. He only says that the particularly cruel and unusual way they were punished evoked pity “even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment.” In other words, everyone agreed they deserved it; they just thought Nero’s particular barbarities were needlessly cruel. And no one ever changed their attitude; even Tacitus retained it (as did his contemporaries Pliny and Suetonius; with nary a contrary voice).

Schmidt could at least get rid of this fact if he joined us in admitting Tacitus never wrote that passage about Christians. But he picked the other lane, so he’s committed to what’s actually in Tacitus. Yet even his ridiculous reimagining of Tacitus doesn’t work. Because to work at all, Schmidt has to be positing a bizarrely radical change of perspective across the Roman Empire twice in just three years between the Antiquities and the ascent of Trajan. That’s right …

Pliny the Younger’s correspondence (Letters 10.96–97) attests a newly lenient attitude under Trajan, which entails a more hateful one under Domitian. This is undeniable: around 110 AD Pliny clearly attests everyone hated Christians and Trajan clearly says the new regime isn’t so into that anymore. But his predecessor Domitian died in 96 AD. The Antiquities was published in 93. So—the entire Roman Empire did a complete double-180 on Christianity in a mere three years? Christians were universally so beloved everyone would understand the story in Josephus and what it was about (this is completely impossible as Pliny, again, proves they were almost totally unknown), and then they were suddenly universally hated and hunted criminals a year or two later (for some unattested and unexplained reason), and then in another year or two the entire empire flipped again and decided Christians were, yes, okay, criminals deserving of torture and execution, but mostly harmless and should be left alone if they keep their heads down—if anyone even remembered what they don’t like about them, which Pliny attests almost no one did. This whiplash sequence of events is nowhere in evidence and wildly improbable. Yet this is what Schmidt has to resort to to get his rhetoric to work.

Needless to say, this kind of specious apologetics should never be passing peer review at Oxford. Nor should any of the rest. But I made that point already. Obviously Josephus would need to explain what a Christ was and why it was relevant here and what it had to do with the story (indeed even that James was a Christian, because the text we have does not say that or entail it), and why anyone is killing them, and why the elite are outraged by that. This would always be necessary for Josephus to have explained here. No apologetic armchair just-so stories can change that. Unless, of course, Josephus wasn’t writing about Christians at all here, but about the only thing he says he was writing about: a petty squabble over administrative procedure that caused a man named Jesus to be appointed high priest at the time. It’s just a story that explained why Jesus replaced Ananus. Which entails this James is his brother. That’s the only purpose the story has here, where we find it.

Only that explains why what crimes James was killed for were too irrelevant to the story for Josephus even to deem worth mentioning. So this story had nothing to do with what James did or taught or said (as I explain in What Did Josephus Mean by That?). It only had to do with when Ananus was allowed to kill him—not even whether James deserved to die. Josephus did think (as did the elite he mentions) that James’s execution was excessive (an overly pedantic enforcement of the law). But it would not have been prevented by Ananus awaiting the Romans convening his court. And it was only that that got Ananus fired. This is a wholly inexplicable story—if it’s about Christians. Which means it probably was not about Christians. That was fabricated by the accidental interpolation of a marginal note guessing that maybe this could somehow be the “Jesus called Christ” Origen couldn’t find but was sure had to be in Josephus somewhere. Because otherwise, if it was about Christians, too much is missing from the narrative to explicably have been written by Josephus.

Schmidt seems more concerned to obscure this fact than confront it. And that’s the difference between disingenuous apologetics and honest historical reasoning.

Conclusion

And that’s all Schmidt has. My case is overwhelming, logical, and evidence-based. His case is made-up, specious, and dishonest. That’s the difference between Christian apologetics (which is all just rhetoric, deception, and “just so” stories) and serious scholarship (which is all about evidence, logic, and context). Schmidt’s abuses were already well proved last time. But this goes to show he continues those tactics even into the only criticism he ever attempts of my work.