the limits of variety 181
down the manuscript of the Midrash Tadsha in (probably) eleventh-
century Provence. The great Italian scholar Azariah de’ Rossi
reintroduced Philo, under the name Yedidiah, to an astonished Jewish
world in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century his allegorizing
was to strike a chord with Reform and Liberal Jews. But only in the
twenty- first century have some of his writings, translated into Hebrew,
been introduced into the liturgy of some Reform congregations.^32
Jesus and Paul
In his narrative of political events when Pontius Pilate was governor of
Judaea in the time of the emperor Tiberius, Josephus followed an
account of a riot in opposition to the building of an aqueduct using
money from the sacred treasury with a description of a disturbance of a
different kind. In the medieval manuscripts of his Antiquities, this
description is transmitted in a remarkable form:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call
him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a
teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews
and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah [Christos]. When Pilate,
upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had
condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to
love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day, he
appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied
these and countless other marvellous things about him. And the tribe of
the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.^33
More was written in antiquity about this one younger contemporary
of Philo, Jesus of Nazareth, than about any other Jew in the last cen-
turies of the Second Temple. It may therefore seem rather surprising that
for much of the twentieth century historians declared that it was impos-
sible to say anything at all about his life and teachings. This failure of
nerve was caused directly by the plethora of information: since so much
of that information is contradictory and patently designed to present
Jesus in a specific light, it seemed impossible to derive from any of it a
clear picture of what really happened. The New Testament, compiled in
c. 120 ce from documents composed by a variety of authors shortly
after the crucifixion of Jesus, contains in its four Gospels four biog-
raphies of Jesus which, despite their many agreements (derived in part