suggest that he has already given an account of Jesus and his mission. But what has actually come down to us is a passage which describes Jesus as a wise man, a lover of truth, and much beloved by his followers: it accepts his miracles and resurrection and hints strongly at his divinity. The passage is plainly a non-tooingenious Christian invention and what Josephus actually wrote has gone. Attempts to reconstruct it have not so far won general acceptance. The inference from Josephus is that Jesus was a Jewish sectarian with messianic claims and a substantial following which had survived his extinction: a nuisance to the empire, in fact. This view is reflected in other non-Christian references, which are few but clearly confirm Jesus’ historicity. Tacitus, in his Annals, writing of the fire of Rome in 64, refers to ‘the detestable superstition’ of Christianity, to ‘Christus, the founder of this sect’, and to his crucifixion ‘in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator Pontius Pilate’ - though it is not clear whether he got this last from Christian or official sources. Pliny the Younger, writing in 112, says the sect 'sang a hymn to Christ as a God’, and refused to curse Christ; only renegades were willing to do so. The earliest reference, by Suetonius, which implies that Christians were known at Rome even in the reign of Claudius, AD 41-54, is unfortunately garbled: he writes of Jews being expelled from Rome because ‘they were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus’. Did he think 'Chrestus' was still alive at the time? Anyway, he, and every other source referring to earliest Christianity, treats Jesus Christ as an actual, historical person. | When we turn to the earliest Christian sources, we enter a terrifying jungle of scholarly contradictions. All were writing evangelism or theology rather than history, even when, like Luke in his gospel, they assume the literary manners of a historian and seek to anchor the events of Jesus’ life in secular chronology. Moreover, all the documents have a long pre-history before they reached written form. Their evaluation was a source of acute puzzlement to thoughtful Christians even in the earliest decades of the second century and probably before. Indeed, the puzzles began as soon as any Christian had access to more than one account or source, written or oral. This was happening increasingly by the closing decades of the first century, for oral accounts continued to circulate long after the earliest written gospels appeared in the two decades 60-80, and were attaining written form well into the second century. The canonical documents (let alone those later judged apocryphal) thus overlap with the earliest writings of the Church Fathers. They are products of the early Church and they are tainted in the sense that they reflect ecclesiastical controversy as well as evangelistic motivation, the difficulties of reducing oral descriptions of mysterious concepts to writing, and a variety of linguistic traps. The four gospels declared canonical, for instance, were circulated, but not necessarily first written, in colloquial Greek; but Matthew was almost certainly translated from Hebrew, and all four were either thought in Aramaic, or transcriptions from tales which were Aramaic in original circulation, yet which drew on Hebrew quotations and, to a lesser extent, on Hellenic or Hellenized concepts. The possibilities for misunderstanding are infinite. Moreover, we cannot assume that the gospels we have reflect the earliest oral traditions. The prologue to Luke makes it clear that they are based on earlier written accounts, themselves derived from the words of eye-witnesses: Luke is thus the third or possibly even fourth link along a chain stretching back two generations. The first Christian to comment on the problem was Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, who flourished in the first decades of the second century. The fourth-century historian Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, through whose compilations Papias survives at all, remarks irritably: ‘Clearly he was very weak of intellect. ' Yet on this subject, at least, he makes sense: '. . . if ever any man came who had been a follower of the elders, | would inquire about the sayings of the elders; what Andrew said, or Peter, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew, or any other of the Lord's disciples; and what Aristion says and John the Elder, who are disciples of the Lord. For | did not consider | got so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice.' By Papias's day, indeed, knowledge of the authorship of the canonical gospels, and the manner in which they were composed, is already confused; what he has to say about Mark and Matthew is shaky tradition, But he gives us a useful hint that at those stages the oral chain, less full of pitfalls, was still 1]