wonderful works. He was a teacher of such men as received the truth with
pleasure. He drew over to him many Jews and Gentiles. This was the
Christ; and when Pilate, at the instigation of the chief men among us
had condemned him to the cross, they who before had conceived an
affection for him did not cease to adhere to him; for, on the third day,
he appeared to them alive again, the divine prophets having foretold
these and many wonderful things concerning him. And the sect of the
Christians, so called from him, subsists to this time." (Antiq. I.
xviii. cap. iii. sect 3.) Whatever become of the controversy concerning
the genuineness of this passage; whether Josephus go the whole length of
our history, which, if the passage be sincere, he does; or whether he
proceed only a very little way with us, which, if the passage be
rejected, we confess to be the case; still what we asserted is true,
that he gives no other or different history of the subject from ours, no
other or different account of the origin of the institution. And I think
also that it may with great reason be contended, either that the passage
is genuine, or that the silence of Josephus was designed. For, although
we should lay aside the authority of our own books entirely, yet when
Tacitus, who wrote not twenty, perhaps not ten, years after Josephus, in
his account of a period in which Josephus was nearly thirty years of
age, tells us, that a vast multitude of Christians were condemned at
Rome; that they derived their denomination from Christ, who, in the
reign of Tiberius, was put to death, as a criminal, by the procurator,
Pontius Pilate; that the superstition had spread not only over Judea,
the source of the evil but it had reached Rome also:--when Suetonius, an
historian contemporary with Tacitus, relates that, in the time of
Claudius, the Jews were making disturbances at Rome, Christus being
their leader: and that, during the reign of Nero, the Christians were
punished; under both which emperors Josephus lived: when Pliny, who
wrote his celebrated epistle not more than thirty years after the