Josephus, writing specially for pagans, is not so candid.  His short notices of Jesus, of John the Baptist, of Judas the 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 en], 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,