182 A History of Judaism
from use of common sources), give somewhat different accounts of
some important aspects of Jesus’ career. The differences are explained
by the theological focus of the genre. ‘Gospel’ translates the Greek word
evangelion, which means ‘good news’ and was already understood in
the earliest writings in the New Testament as a reference to the news of
the salvation of humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
The four canonical Gospels were believed in the early second century
to have been transmitted by the apostles of Jesus. They were clearly
reckoned by the compilers of the New Testament canon to have enough
in common to be adopted as authoritative in preference to the deriv-
ative narratives found in the many ‘apocryphal’ gospels known from
citation in later Christian writings or from the discovery of papyrus
codices in Nag Hammadi in Egypt. It is disconcerting to note that the
earliest Christian evidence, the writings of Paul, which date to the mid-
first century ce, is almost totally silent about the career and teachings
of Jesus, apart from the crucifixion. Roman sources revealed nothing
about Jesus until the early second century, when they show awareness
of his origins in Judaea and the name ‘Christus’. The polemical stories
preserved in the rabbinic literature about Yeshu or ‘that man’, known in
the medieval tradition as Toledot Yeshu, are all hostile versions of the
stories told by Christians. They may go back to a Jewish counter-
narrative to the Gospels circulating from the first century ce among
Jews who rejected Jesus.^34
The explicit account of Jesus’ career cited above is found in all the
extant manuscripts of the Antiquities of Josephus. It has the appearance
of objective history. But since the seventeenth century its authenticity
has been doubted – on good grounds, for Josephus, who was not a
Christian, could hardly have said of Jesus ‘this was the Messiah’. It
seems almost certain that Josephus wrote something about Jesus, and it
may even be possible to identify in the passage as found in the manu-
scripts those words which a Christian interpolator is unlikely to have
added. But this would not leave much more information than that
Jesus lived around this time, that he was crucified by Pilate and that the
‘tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has to this day still not
disappeared’.^35
In more recent years it has become clear that historical despair was
premature and unnecessary. Doubtless some pieces of ancient inform-
ation about Jesus are more suspect than others, but it is reasonable to
suppose that those elements of the tradition about his life and teaching