For decades, if you went to pretty much any university, opened up a mainstream textbook, or listened to the self-appointed experts in academia, you were told that writings of first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus was a fraud. Or at least, that it was heavily doctored.
Why did they say that? Well, think about it. Josephus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jewish historian writing in Rome around the year 93 AD. Christians were not very popular around then. Yet, in his book Antiquities of the Jews, he writes about Jesus. He mentions his execution by Pontius Pilate. He mentions his followers. And he even refers to Jesus as “the Christ.”
Now, the modern academic consensus has always been that there’s no way a Jewish man writing for Rome would write that. So they invented the sneaky medieval monks. When in doubt, blame those sneaky medieval monks. They said the heretofore unknown sneaky medieval monks forged those lines and slipped them into the text. Case closed. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Except…what if the experts were wrong? Again.
Everything was fine up until a scholar named T. C. Schmidt at Fairfield University, actually did some research. He looked at the exact Greek vocabulary, the sentence structure, and the word frequencies across all of Josephus’s writings. And it turns out, every single word of that controversial passage matches Josephus’s writing style. In short, not a forgery. Not a sloppy cut-and-paste job by sneaky medieval monks. It’s Josephus.
This is big news. Really big. It’s extra-biblical evidence of Christ in the first century.
There’s some really interesting things going on by this professor. For instance, the Greek word that gets translated into English as “miracles” actually means something closer to “paranormal deeds.” Josephus was writing as someone who didn’t quite know what to make of Jesus. He wrote as someone unsure if these powers were divine or something else entirely.
Also, when Josephus mentions the resurrection, he’s reporting what Jesus’s followers claimed happened, not necessarily signing on as a believer himself. And remember: Josephus came from the exact Jerusalem priestly circles that were directly involved in Jesus’s trial. He had access to the people who were actually there.
Naturally, the establishment won’t give up without a fight. But this is yuuuuge news.
To be more precise, skeptics of the Testimonium Flavianum have asserted that the Testimonium was either 1) forged in its entirety by Christians, or 2) tampered with by Christians. Some of them argue that it was a medieval Christians who forged the Testimonium AND all of the references to the Testimonium in the Early Church Fathers. Some of them argue that the Testimonium was forged by the Early Church Fathers. Others argue that the Testimonium is partly authentic, but was tampered with by the Early Church Fathers. However, the skeptics do not generally subject the Testimonium Flavianum to a serious analysis, providing a convincing account of how and when it was forged or tampered with. For most skeptics the main point is to reject historical evidence of Jesus, whether the evidence is authentic or not.
Schmidt started out skeptical or agnostic regarding the Testimonium, but having subjected it to a critical grammatical, historical, and forensic analysis, he came to write and publish his study showing that there is no reason why Flavius Josephus could not have written it and very good reasons to believe that he did. Oxford University Press doesn’t publish works of pseudoscholarship. Schmidt is a serious and respected academic. Everyone should read his book. It can be purchased or even downloaded for free at his website:
https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/