at the instigation of the chief men among us had condemned
him to the cross, they who before had conceived an
affection for him did not cease to adhere to him; for,
on the third day, he appeared to them alive again,
the divine prophets having foretold these and many
wonderful things concerning him. And the sect
of the Christians, so called from him, subsists to
this time.” (Antiq. I. xviii. cap. iii.
sect 3.) Whatever become of the controversy concerning
the genuineness of this passage; whether Josephus go
the whole length of our history, which, if the passage
be sincere, he does; or whether he proceed only a
very little way with us, which, if the passage be
rejected, we confess to be the case; still what we
asserted is true, that he gives no other or different
history of the subject from ours, no other or different
account of the origin of the institution. And
I think also that it may with great reason be contended,
either that the passage is genuine, or that the silence
of Josephus was designed. For, although we should
lay aside the authority of our own books entirely,
yet when Tacitus, who wrote not twenty, perhaps not
ten, years after Josephus, in his account of a period
in which Josephus was nearly thirty years of age,
tells us, that a vast multitude of Christians were
condemned at Rome; that they derived their denomination
from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was put
to death, as a criminal, by the procurator, Pontius
Pilate; that the superstition had spread not only over
Judea, the source of the evil but it had reached Rome
also:—when Suetonius, an historian contemporary
with Tacitus, relates that, in the time of Claudius,
the Jews were making disturbances at Rome, Christus
being their leader: and that, during the reign
of Nero, the Christians were punished; under both
which emperors Josephus lived: when Pliny, who
wrote his celebrated epistle not more than thirty years
after the publication of Josephus’s history,
found the Christians in such numbers in the province
of Bithynia as to draw from him a complaint that the
contagion had seized cities, towns, and villages, and
had so seized them as to produce a general desertion
of the public rites; and when, as has already been
observed, there is no reason for imagining that the
Christians were more numerous in Bithynia than in many
other parts of the Roman empire; it cannot, I should
suppose, after this, be believed, that the religion,
and the transaction upon which it was founded, were
too obscure to engage the attention of Josephus, or
to obtain a place in his history. Perhaps he
did not know how to represent the business, and disposed
of his difficulties by passing it over in silence.
Eusebius wrote the life of Constantine, yet omits
entirely the most remarkable circumstance in that
life, the death of his son Crispus; undoubtedly for
the reason here given. The reserve of Josephus
upon the subject of Christianity appears also in his
passing over the banishment of the Jews by Claudius,
which Suetonius, we have seen, has recorded with an
express reference to Christ. This is at least
as remarkable as his silence about the infants of
Bethlehem.* Be, however, the fact, or the cause of
the omission in Josephus,+ what it may, no other or
different history on the subject has been given by
him, or is pretended to have been given.