The testimony of our earliest known non-Christian witness to Jesus closely correlates with what the writers of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) believed and wrote about Jesus: that Jesus performed miracles, was accepted as the Christ by his followers, was condemned to death by Pilate at the instigation of Jewish leaders, crucified on a cross, and viewed as risen from the dead by his devotees—all in fulfillment of prophetic Scripture.

Most of you have probably heard of Josephus. An enormous amount of what we know about the history and culture of the Jewish people in and around the time of Jesus comes from Josephus. But Josephus only wrote one paragraph about Jesus. That paragraph is famous. It is so famous that the paragraph has its own name (in Latin): Testimonium Flavianum (TF).[1] As famous as it is, it is also famously disputed. Until the publication of T. C. Schmidt’s new academic monograph, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, the consensus among most modern historians has been that this famous paragraph was partially (or fully) interpolated by Christians scribes who placed nice words about Jesus on the lips of Josephus (impacting the later manuscript tradition).

Let me paste in this paragraph as it’s normally translated/interpreted so you can see why modern historians have typically viewed this as too positively “Christian” for a non-Christian Jew like Josephus to have written. This section is from Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews 18.63-4, “according to how it has most often been interpreted by modern scholars”[2]:

And in this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of miraculous deeds, a teacher of men who receive truth with pleasure. And he led many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was the Christ. And, when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who at first loved him did not cease to do so, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And up till now the tribe of the Christians, who were named from him, has not disappeared.

Most historians have viewed this paragraph as too “Christian” to have been written by Josephus. But Schmidt has methodically (and convincingly, in my opinion) dismantled the consensus that views significant parts of this paragraph as having been forged by Christian scribes. The paragraph is not positive (as modern scholars have assumed) but should be viewed as “a relatively ambiguous TF that can be plausibly interpreted negatively or neutrally.”[3]

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