| <head>III.<hi rend="italic">Christian Influence on the Text</hi></head><p>A third possible reason for suspecting that Josephus was not responsible for all of the Pharisee passages in his works is that those works were preserved from antiquity by the Christian Church, whose anti-Pharisaic stance was already revealed in the Gospels and continued unabated. It is widely believed that the<hi rend="italic">testimonium flavianum</hi>of Josephus has at least been glossed by a Christian hand.<note id="p1_excur_n39" place="foot">The literature on the<hi rend="italic">testimonium</hi>is enormous. For a brief overview see the<span class="abbr" title="Loeb Classical Library">LCL</span>edn. of Josephus, IX, 48ff. (by L. H. Feldman).</note>Is it not conceivable, then, that the Church altered Josephus's accounts of the Pharisees, since this group was the object of its displeasure?</p><pb n="52" /><p>Although a logical possibility, the idea of Christian tampering with Josephus's Pharisee passages has hardly ever been put forward. I. Elbogen was one of its few advocates. Arguing that the rabbinic literature offers the only suitable entrée to Pharisaic thought, Elbogen suggested that the Christian copyists who handed down Josephus's writings suppressed (<hi rend="italic">unterdrückten</hi>) everything in them that was inconvenient for Christian belief; the censored material allegedly contained favourable presentations of the Pharisees.<note id="p1_excur_n40" place="foot">Elbogen,<hi rend="italic">Religionsanschauungen</hi>, 4.</note>Elbogen pointed to Josephus's repeated claim in<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish Antiquities">Ant.</span></hi>(13:173, 298; 18:11) that he had already given a full discussion of the Jewish schools in<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish War">War</span></hi>; but<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish Antiquities">Ant.</span></hi>expands considerably on the material that we now possess in<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish War">War</span></hi>. Elbogen proposed that Christian copyists deleted from<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish War">War</span></hi>those descriptions of the Pharisees that contradicted their impressions from the Gospels:</p><p><q>Da die Pharisäer als die eigentlichen prinzipiellen Gegner des Christentums angesehen wurden, so glaubten man in der Charakteristik des Pharisäertums durch Josephus nicht mehr die Wahrheit zu finden und liesst nur stehen, was neben ihrem von den Evangelien entworfenen Bilde sich sehen lassen konnte.<note id="p1_excur_n41" place="foot">Ibid.</note></q></p><p>Elbogen did not actually suggest, then, that copyists altered the Pharisee passages that now stand, only that they deleted a more positive portrayal from<hi rend="italic"><span class="abbr" title="The Jewish War">War</span></hi>. (This theory, significantly, reveals Elbogen's judgement that the remaining Pharisee passages are unfavourable toward the group.)</p><p>Unfortunately, Elbogen's idea remained unsubstantiated by more precise indications of what the deleted material had contained, where it had stood, and when it was excised. Without these crucial supports, the hypothesis could not survive.</p><p>The other theoretical possibility, of Christian responsibility for the Pharisee passages that remain, runs aground on the circumstance that the passages most hostile toward the Pharisees come in pieces of historical narrative, concerning events under the Hasmoneans and Herod, which the Church can hardly have supplied. Christian influence would thus be limited to some sort of "colouring"; the problem would then be to separate this colouring from Josephus's own contribution.</p><p>No hypothesis of Christian tampering with Josephus's Pharisee passages is being proposed in this study and consequently no obligation is assumed to discover the hand of the copyist. For our purpose, it is sufficient to note that the Church's transmission of Josephus's writings has never been shown to have included any tampering with his descriptions of the Pharisees.</p> |
