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THE RESURRECTION. Left, by Johann Tischbein the Elder, 1763; right, by Raphael, 1502.
[NB: The Tischbein painting, which is at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, illustrated Benedict XVI's last Easter greeting card as Pope in 2012.
This is a delayed post because I only caught sight of the lead to it on Socci’s Facebook page today though I swear I check it our daily. It is also
the kind of research that I do not recall any Anglophone Vaticanista ever undertaking, whereas conscientious Italian Catholic writers like Vittorio Messori
and Antonio Socci do it constantly and regularly, and are able to share their findings not only in articles but also in best-selling books…
Reviewing the historical facts about
about the resurrection of Jesus
Translated from
April 16, 2017
Among the most widespread ‘fake news’ about Jesus is that there are no historical documents dating to his time on earth that speak of him and his resurrection.
But the opposite is true: There is a surprising quantity of such documents (I list them in my book La guerra contro Gesù). Which in itself is unusual. Because not even on Alexander the Great do we have such and so much historical sources - the earliest known texts about him were written 400 years after he died and therefore not very reliable.
One of the most impressive testimonial accounts of Jesus was that of Flavius Josephus – a Jewish historian, politician and military official who was born in Jerusalem in 37 A.D. (four years after the death of Jesus), who went to Rome and lived as part of the imperial circle after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.
In his Antichità giudaiche (Jewish Antiquities) written in 93 A.D., he speaks of John the Baptist first, and then of Jesus:
At that time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if one could call him human. In fact, he performed extraordinary feats and was the teacher of men who welcomed the truth with joy, attracting to him not just many Jews but also many Greeks. He was the Christ.
When he was denounced by those whom the Romans considered the chiefs [of the Jews], Pilate ordered him crucified. But those who loved him in life did not stop loving him. He appeared to them alive three days after being buried, according to what prophets had said of him among a thousand other marvels they cited. Today, there exists the group that have taken their name from him and are known as Christians”
Modern secular culture has decreed that this page – called Testimonium flavianum – contains subsequent Christian interpolations, namely, “if one could call him human”, “he was the Christ” [from the Greek word Christos, meaning ‘the anointed one’, used as a title for the saviour and redeemer who would bring salvation to the Jewish people and mankind. Christians believe that Jesus is the Jewish messiah called Christ in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Christ, used by Christians as both a name and a title, is synonymous with Jesus], “those whom the Romans considered the chiefs [of the Jews]”, and “he appeared to them alive three days after being buried”.
It is significant that Flavius’s phrase “he performed extraordinary feats” (i.e., he made miracles) has not been contested – perhaps because this fact is confirmed by other authoritative Jewish sources. But what about the other objections?
The solution to the controversy appeared to come in 1971 when an Isralei scholar, Prof. Sholomo Piness of the Jewish University of Jerusalem, found a different version of the Testimonium in an Arabic codex of the 10th century – Universal History by Agapius, Bishop of Hierapolis in Syria. Here it is:
“At that time, there lived a wise man named Jesus. His conduct was good and he was esteemed for his virtue. There were many, among the Jews and from other nations, became his dicsciples. Pilate condemned him to ddeath by crucifixion. But those who had become his disciples never stopped following his teaching. They recounted that he appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Perhaps this was because he was the Messiah about whom the prophets had foretold many wonders.”
This new version, which is considered free of Christian interpolations and therefore ‘totally authentic’, is nevertheless an exceptional historical testimony because if contains and confirms the facts reported by the Gospels: the fascinating figure of Jesus who was followed by the crowds, his wisdom his goodness, his crucifixion, and finally, the fact that his followers publicly affirmed that he had risen from the dead and that they had seen and interacted with him.
To understand the importance of this testimony about Jesus by Flavius Josephus, one must bear in mind that he was not only a historian who lived almost contemporaneous with Jesus, who was born in Jerusalem not long after Jesus was crucified, but also that his family was of the priestly caste. Therefore, he belonged to the Jewish ruling class in Jerusalem (he himself became the ambassador of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin to Rome), and therefore, he had access to direct sources about Jesus of Nazareth from his own family and the circles in which he grew.
Thus, if on that April morning in the year 30 (or 33), nothing had happened at the tomb of Jesus just outside the city walls, Flavius Josephus would have written, from personal and direct information, that the resurrection of the Nazarene was a fable – ‘fake news’ – and that his body continued to be in the sepulcher where he was buried.
Or, accepting that the body of Jesus had disappeared from the tomb, he would have had to recount the official version of the Jewish high priests according to which the ‘cadaver’ – despite the presence of their guards – had been ‘stolen’ by Jesus’s disciples. In any case, Flavius Josephus, who was not Christian, would have ridiculed the reported resurrection of Jesus. But he did not.
Instead, he writes, “He appeared to them alive the third day after he was buried”. Or in the version of Agapius, the followers of Jesus “recounted that he appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive”.
Josephus – who knew the facts he reported from direct sources – did not add any critical or skeptical word about the resurrection, but rather, after having recounted the facts objectively as a historian, he goes on to credit the version of the Christians as the more probable and credible, leading him to say “perhaps…he was the Messiah…”
So, even if we accept that the original Testimonium flavianum may have contained Christian interpolations, we still have Agapius’s version – supposedly free of such interpolations – which remains
striking because it reports the resurrection.
It must be added that in recent years, some scholars have started to maintain that the authentic text by Josephus was the original Testimonium flavianum and that Agapius’s version was merely a synthesis of the original.
Indeed, contrary to what the atheist mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi claims (that “many manuscripts that have come down to us do not contain the Testimonium flavianum”), in all the codices relating to Jewish antiquity that have come down to us from all sources, one finds the text of Josephus’s testimonial. On this, there is unanimity.
That is why it is difficult to speak of Christian interpolations – about which no one has come up with any proof (proofs which ought to have turned up before 150 AD). A historian has remarked: “How can one speak of ‘interpolations’ if they are similarly found in all the Flavius texts in Rome, in Alexandria, in Carthage, in Caesarea, etc, at the time? If all the existing Flavian texts at the time had been tampered, how could it have been done without anyone knowing? Were all the librarians at the time Christian?”
Recent studies, like that of Serge Bardet, have reconsidered the phrases tagged ‘Christian interpolations’ and concluded that they are compatible with Flavius and that they could not have been written by Christians [The phrases are drily objective and lack the wonder of faith!]
But why would a Jewish historian writing in the imperial Roman court in the ninth decade of the Christian era – when Christians in Rome were actively persecuted – have felt himself free to think Jesus of Nazareth might have been the Messiah, and more, to report the fact of his resurrection?
Carsten Peter Thiede explains: “For Josephus, Jesus was a priestly Messiah, one of the two or three described in some of the Dead Sea scrolls who are supposed to appear in the ‘final days’. In any case, Jesus was not a warrior come to fight battles on earth and to bring political peace to the world.
Josephus made a choice. For him, the ‘messiah’ who came from the Judean desert, who won battles and brought peace after the failure of the Jewish revolt against Rome, was none other than the Roman general Vespasian, proclaimed Roman emperor in Judea in 68 AD. Thus, in a single blow, Josephus accepts and confirms the news of the Gospels and changes its meaning”.
So Josephus meant to convince his own people that the Messiah had arrived, that his mission was spiritual, and that it was pernicious to await other ‘messiahs’ in order to organize new disastrous wars of liberation from the Romans. He held a totally political viewpoint – pragmatic to the point of cynicism – but nonetheless, the facts he reported are historically precious [for Christianity].
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/04/2017 00:18] |