James In JosephusPaul SmithThe passage attributed to Josephus in our surviving copies of the Antiquities concerning the martyrdom of James is regarded by some scholars to be a Christian interpolation (E Schurer, H Chadwick) – but regarded as genuine by others: J Stevenson, for example, considered it to be primary proof of Jesus Christ's historicity and used the passage as the first entry to his book A New Eusebius – documents illustrating the history of the Church to AD337 (1957; revised and amended by WHC Frend in 1987). Josephus described Ananus, the High Priest responsible for the death of James in the Antiquities, thus: "...a bold man in his temper, and very insolent." Josephus did not mention the martyrdom of James in his Jewish Wars – and his description of Ananus there is quite different to what is found in the Antiquities, describing him this time as: "...a venerable, and a very just man; and besides the grandeur of that nobility, and dignity, and honour, of which he possessed, he had been a lover of a kind of parity, even with regard to the meanest of the people; he was a prodigious lover of liberty, and an admirer of democracy in government; and did ever prefer the public welfare before his own advantage, and preferred peace above all things; he was thoroughly sensible that the Romans were not to be conquered." Significantly, Josephus also wrote the following about Ananus in the Jewish Wars: "I should not mistake if I said that the death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city (Jerusalem), and that from this very day may be dated the overthrow of her wall, and the ruin of her affairs, whereon they saw their high priest, and the procurer of their preservation, slain in the midst of their city." So, according to Josephus, the destruction of Jerusalem happened as a consequence of the death of Ananus – which casts a very dark shadow over the testimony of Origen of Alexandria, who claimed that Jospehus believed that the destruction of Jerusalem was due to the martyrdom of James, the brother of Jesus. It is entirely possible that Origen originally got the idea for claiming what he did from Hegesippus – who wrote in his Memoirs that the destruction of Jerusalem followed the death of James (preserved in the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius) – before attributing the same thing to Josephus (in contrast to the real views of Josephus). It would not be unusual for a Christian like Origen to have done something like this – there is for example the "Josephus quotation" given by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 2:10 in relation to Acts 12:23 (the authentic passage by Josephus existing in Antiquities 19:346).
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