of Christian authors in the second and third centuriesc.e., who cite him
with increasing emphasis through Origen in the third century. The influ-
ential fourth-century bishop and court panegyrist Eusebius is crucial for
Josephus’s legacy, because of his extensive use of Josephus and because of
his own subsequent importance as the “father of church history.” Euse-
bius’s exploitation of “the most distinguished of historians among the He-
brews” (Hist. Eccl.1.5.3) reflects the general Christian perception of the
time: here is an outsider who cannot be accused of Christian tendentious-
ness, who yet describes in lurid detail the fall of Jerusalem (predicted by Je-
sus, according to the Gospels, as divine punishment on the Jews for failing
to accept Jesus), and who excoriates the failings of his own people in the
process. Josephus’s heartbreaking story of the starving aristocratic woman
who cooked and ate her own infant child during the siege of Jerusalem
(J.W.6.200-214) was particularly useful to Eusebius and later Christian
teachers, who wished to claim that the Jews, obviously capable of such de-
pravity, had been justly punished by God and excluded from their heritage
in salvation history. Josephus’s incidental mention of Jesus of Nazareth
(Ant.18.63-64: thetestimonium flavianum), which treats him respectfully
— though our existing version has undergone at least a little doctoring in
the manuscript tradition — led to its being cited even more than the story
of Maria’s cannibalism.
The problem was that Josephus himself had entirely different points to
make about the fall of Jerusalem, and about Jesus and the countless other
individuals he mentions — as a Thucydidean-Polybian sort of statesman
lamenting political folly. Whereas a scholar such as Eusebius could exploit
Josephus’s lack of association with Christian belief for rhetorical traction,
by interweaving large quotations with Christian claims as if the two were
providentially compatible, other writers of the period felt that his factual
material should be liberated from his “Jewish unbelief.” So, later in Euse-
bius’s century, the unknown author we call Pseudo-Hegesippus reworked
the GreekWa rinto Latin, inserting pieces fromAntiquitiesbut removing
what seemed too Jewish (replaced by abundant Christian glosses), to pro-
duce an account of Jerusalem’s fall that would be safe for Christian readers.
Centuries later the opposite tack was taken by the Cambridge mathemati-
cian William Whiston, who in his celebrated 1737 translation of Josephus,
still in wide circulation today, understood him to be an Ebionite Christian.
From late antiquity and the Middle Ages we have little or no evidence
of Jewish interest in the writings of this famous priest. This can be ex-
plained by his surrender to the Romans under conditions that smacked of314steve mason, james s. mclaren, and john m. g. barclayEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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