works, such as the first and second books of Maccabees, that
recount the Jewish revolt against the Hellenistic king of Syria
in the mid-second century BC, and texts written in the style of
scripture, such as the books called Tobit,Judith, and the Wisdom
of Solomon. In addition to these works there exists a large
corpus of literature that modern scholars have termed the ‘pseude-
pigrapha’, a word that means ‘falsely ascribed’. In some cases,
these works seem to have been written pseudonymously, in that
their authors passed them off as works by one of the authors of
the books of the Hebrew Bible. In other cases, however, the attri-
bution developed more accidentally in the course of the copying
and transmission of the texts in the manuscript tradition. The texts
that make up the pseudepigrapha were composed by Jewish
authors between c. 200 BCandc.AD200. Apart from a few frag-
ments preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, they have
come down to us mainly from Christian collections (Jonge 1985).
Efforts to identify New Testament personalities in Jewish
writings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls are built on the assump-
tion that Jesus and his followers were so important that they must
have made an impact upon contemporaries, both Jewish and
Roman. The reality, at least for the first century AD, seems to
have been more ambiguous. To stay with Jewish sources for the
moment, consider the debate that has raged about references to
Jesus in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus. He was
writing after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 and thus at
the same time as the traditions about Jesus were beginning to
take shape as the synoptic gospels. There is a notorious passage
in his Jewish Antiquities(18.3.3) that summarizes the career,
death, and resurrection of Jesus, and which even states explicitly
that ‘he was the Christ [i.e. the Messiah]’. This passage – known
as the Testimonium Flavianum (the Flavian Testimony, after
Josephus’ adopted Roman forename, Flavius) – has provoked
much scholarly argument. Some historians have accepted it as
entirely genuine, although this opinion has fallen out of favour
almost completely. Others have seen here – and in another passage
that talks of ‘Jesus who was called the Christ’ (Jewish Antiquities
SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION1
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