Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Jesus Proof?

Media – John Dickson talk

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s me (and some fairly dodgy audio) about 8 years ago speaking in a Coptic church in Australia about the historical Jesus—hello to my Coptic friends! In particular, I was drawing attention to the writings of Flavius Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian who wrote perhaps our earliest references to Jesus outside the New Testament.  And this next little bit of that talk is something I’ve said many, many times in my work – in public talks like this one and in university lectures. 

Media – John Dickson talk

John Dickson (Studio)

The statement ‘the truth is in the middle’ is often the best in the study of ancient history. But my guest today might make me eat my words.  Flavius Josephus, an aristocratic Jewish writer of the first century, published almost 500,000 words in his lifetime, including his magnificent 20-volume ‘History of the Jewish People’, often called Antiquities of the Jews.  He is the main historical source for the Roman East (Syria, Galilee, Judaea)–he tells us loads of things about politics, wars, religion, and daily life that we just wouldn’t know without his works. But out of all he wrote, two small paragraphs, and one in particular, would be analysed and debated over more than everything else. Those 90 words are of such interest they get their own name: Testimonium Flavianum – ‘the testimony of Flavius Josephus’. 

Here is a typical translation of it: 

Reading

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.

John Dickson (Studio)

The Testimonium Flavianum appears on the surface to be a powerful piece of external evidence that Jesus existed as a real person in history from a non-Christian source. It’s really important. But I’ve spent my life qualifying that conclusion. Here’s me in The Christ Files documentary, 16 years ago, as I handled a thousand-year-old copy of Josephus in St John’s College, Cambridge! 

Media – The Christ Files

John Dickson (Studio)

For twenty years I’ve taught the standard scholarly view of the Testimonium Flavianum. Whether in the Macquarie University Ancient History Department or the Sydney University Jewish studies department, I always outlined to students the scholarly consensus about this paragraph: that the Josephus himself in the first century wrote a brief, neutral remark about Jesus, which was later “improved”  by a naughty Christian scribe who in copying out Josephus’ works wanted to make Josephus’ remark about Jesus a little more positive. That more amplified paragraph then just got copied by others and became the standard published paragraph read out a moment ago, complete with the obviously fake reference to Jesus rising again and fulfilling the prophets.  But after reading a new book–the first major work on the topic in decades–and working on this episode, I feel I might need to apologise to my former students. On the details of the Testimonium Flavianum I might have been …. wrong. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
Uh, Tom, this has to be one of the most fought over 100-word passages in all of ancient literature outside the New Testament. So I’m thinking, what on earth possessed you to say, ‘Oh yeah, I wanna jump into that raging ocean of scholarship?

TC Schmidt:
I didn’t do it intentionally at first. I was in a PhD seminar at Yale University and it was on the Historical Jesus. And I also study, aside from the New Testament, I study Arabic and Syriac Christianity. And I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s some way I could combine these two fields’. There are Arabic and Syriac translations of The Testimonium Flavianum, of this passage. So I thought, ‘I’ll write a paper on that’. And I did. And that’s what first got me on the scent, got me on the trail of this, and I started seeing that this standard argument about how the passage has been tampered with just didn’t hold up to the evidence I was seeing and the data I was observing. And so … 

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Tom Schmidt, Associate Professor at Fairfield University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. Tom’s particular interest is the historical Jesus and early Christianity. And he’s the author of a new book titled Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, out now with Oxford University Press. It’s peer-reviewed. It’s super nerdy. And it is making a splash in the field. So much so that some impressed benefactor has paid for a digital version of the book to be made available worldwide FREE!! We’ll pop a link in the show notes.

John Dickson:
We’ll get to all of that evidence. Um, okay, so you went down this little rabbit hole and, and, and, and it just kept on going and going and going and, uh, before you knew it, uh, you’ve got a monograph, which is great fun. Uh, let, can we, let’s start broadly with the man Josephus. Um, some of my listeners might not know anything about him other than his name, and we’ll get our voice actor to read some of his, uh, autobiography just so you can get a flavor of how important he was or thought he was. But, um, tell me about the man. Give us an overview of Josephus.

T.C. Schmidt:
He was born to a very eminent, priestly family in Jerusalem in 37 AD. His father was a priest when Jesus was crucified and he was Ra Josephus was raised in Jerusalem. Uh, he was raised to be a priest. He also became a Pharisee. Uh, some scholars think instead of becoming a Pharisee, he only followed the rules of Pharisees. Nevertheless, he knew all about Pharisees. He became a priest at age 25. At age 25, he also became an ambassador and met with the Empress in Rome. He was a general at age 30 in the Jewish war, and this was an enormously prestigious appointment. There were only seven of them, and he was appointed as governor – it was a political position as much as a military one. And then after the defeat of the Romans, after the defeat of the Jews at the hands of the Romans, he devoted the rest of his life to writing history. And he wrote the history of the Jewish people in several different works. He became one of the finest historians the ancient world ever produced. And from his books, we learn an enormous amount about first-century Jerusalem and Galilee. He’s the most important source we have outside the New Testament on what is going on in that area at that time…

Media – The Dovekeepers

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s a clip from The Dovekeepers, a 2015 TV series produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett—pretty big deals in Hollywood. That was New Zealand actor Sam Neill better known as Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park—playing Flavius Josephus, chronicler of the Roman siege of Masada in AD 73. The show didn’t fare well with critics—The Hollywood Reporter said Neill’s gravitas lent weight “to what is otherwise goofball.” A shame, really, because the story of Masada is epic, tragic, and deeply human. If you’re curious, there’s a 1981 miniseries about it starring Peter O’Toole. The point is: Josephus is our main source for the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 AD), including the fall of Jerusalem and the temple’s destruction. His is the only surviving account of Masada, where Jewish rebels chose to die by their own hands rather than surrender. Josephus also gives us invaluable detail about daily life—Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, even Herod’s massive temple renovations. When it comes to understanding first-century Galilee and Judaea, there’s no more detailed source than Josephus.

John Dickson:
I was gonna ask you. Yeah. How do you rate him as a source for the Roman East?

TC Schmidt:
Huge.

John Dickson:
You, you’re saying there’s nothing that matches it.

TC Schmidt:
Yeah. Especially for Judea and the Jewish people, there’s, there’s nothing that really comes close to him.

John Dickson:
He has complicated perspectives. I’ll say perspectives instead of bias, um, because of course he says he’s Jewish. He says that he’s Pharisee. But, uh, he, he could be interpreted as betraying his people in the war against Rome. Can you just tell us briefly about that flip to become quite pro-Roman as a Jew?

TC Schmidt:
And a General fighting against the Romans. What he would probably say is he would probably point to Jeremiah the prophet who warned his people, the Jewish people, to not fight against the invaders – they were gonna lose. And it wasn’t wise to do that. So Josephus, I think, realizes the Romans are this overwhelming empire and the Jews stand no chance. And he’s worried about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. And he falls under the he, he’s. He’s, he’s captured by the emperor or the future emperor Vespasian, and he starts helping him to try to get the Jews to surrender and it doesn’t work. And of course the temple’s destroyed. So he would say he was trying to rescue the Jews. Uh, obviously you could interpret it differently that he was betraying them. Um, so if you take a sympathetic view, he’s just a realist who understands what the Jews were up against at the time.

John Dickson (Studio)

Mary Beard, the celebrated Roman historian, brands Josephus the “luckiest traitor ever”. Others view him as a simple pragmatist who knew history was on the side of the Romans. Regardless, when Emperor Vespasian returned to Rome as emperor, Josephus went with him. He spent his remaining decades in the city, writing and rubbing shoulders with Emperors while dealing with the fallout of siding with the Romans.

Reading

And when we were come to Rome, I had great care taken of me by Vespasian. For he gave me an apartment in his own house, which he lived in before he came to the Empire. He also honoured me with the privilege of a Roman citizen; and gave me an annual pension: and continued to respect me to the end of his life, without any abatement of his kindness to me. When Vespasian was dead, Titus, who succeeded him in the government, kept up the same respect for me, which I had from his father: and when I had frequent accusations laid against me, he would not believe them. And Domitian, who succeeded, still augmented his respects to me: for he punished those Jews that were my accusers; and gave command that a servant of mine, who was an eunuch, and my accuser, should be punished. He also made that country I had in Judea tax free: which is a mark of the greatest honour to him who hath it. Nay Domitia, the wife of Cesar, continued to do me kindnesses. And this is the account of the actions of my whole life. And let others judge of my character by them, as they please.

The Life of Flavius Josephus – Autobiography

John Dickson (Studio)

Four of Josephus’ works survive today: his autobiography, his history of the Roman-Jewish conflict (called The Jewish War), defence of Judaism titled Against Apion, and then there was his history of the Jewish people, The Antiquities of the Jews, which starts with accounts drawn from the Jewish Scriptures (OT) but then about two-thirds through becomes a pretty solid independent history from the Maccabean revolt of 167BC through to the outbreak of the Jewish War in AD 66.  

John Dickson:
And what do you think he’s trying to do in the Antiquities of the Jews?

TC Schmidt:
He has a complicated task. The Jews have been obliterated by the Romans in 70 ad. There’s enormous amount of bias against Jews, amongst the Romans and amongst the Roman elites. His people have been destroyed and scattered. So he’s writing this work for a number of reasons. He’s writing these historical works to preserve Jewish history. He’s also writing it to defend Judaism in the face of this unrelenting criticism and, and bias and Stig stigmas. 

Reading

For since I was myself interested in that war which we Jews had with the Romans, and knew my self its particular actions, and what conclusion it had, I was forced to give the history of it, because I saw that others perverted the truth of those actions in their writings. Now I have undertaken the present work, as thinking it will appear to all the Greeks worthy of their study: for it will contain all our antiquities, and the constitution of our government, as interpreted out of the Hebrew scriptures.

Josephus – Preface to ‘The Antiquities of the Jews’

TC Schmidt:
So he’s trying to make Judaism intelligible sympathetic in the eyes of elite Greeks and Romans, and so he, he’s retelling Jewish history and explaining Jewish customs in a way that will be sympathetic in the eyes of the Jew, of, of the Jewish otherwise enemies, the the Greeks and the Romans. Um, he, some people claim he’s, he’s, you know, defending the emperor. Uh, but you can, he critiques the emperor at times. Uh, he doesn’t seem to be this full throated apology for the Romans. Um, but it’s complicated. You know, he, there’s people who he’s allies with who he actually, it turns out, doesn’t really like, so he compliments them, but then will critique them at other times. He’s a very complicated man.

John Dickson:
Do we have any indication of how his work was received? In, in the period in which he wrote it. I mean, how successful was he in the late first century?

TC Schmidt:
We do have some indication. He, he tells us – now his perspective could be biased, but he tells us that he presented this work to the emperor and to the next emperor as well, the son of Vespasian. He also describes, uh, presenting it to Herod Agrippa II, who’s the last surviving king of the Jews. He’s mentioned in the New Testament. He comes up in the book of Acts. We, so he, he forwarded his documents to the Herodian Dynasty, the last vestiges of the Herodian Dynasty. We also know he got criticism. There was a Jewish writer named Justice of Tiberius who deeply criticized Josephus. He wrote a book critiquing Josephus. Josephus writes a response to this. We have Josephus’ response, but we don’t have the actual book, the original book that was written, other than scattered references. So we know that some people didn’t like what he had to say, but they mostly – Justice critiqued Josephus’s conduct as a General, he didn’t, he doesn’t seem to have critiqued Josephus’s ‘History of the Jewish people’, so to speak.

John Dickson (Studio)

Josephus’ writings are a treasure trove for historians—but we have to read him in context, like any source. He was right in the thick of the religious and political turmoil he describes, and that inevitably shaped his view. But that’s normal in ancient history. Every source has an angle (we might say pejoratively ‘bias’). Tacitus, the greatest of Rome’s historians, was very committed to a particular noble vision of Rome and very dubious of Rome’s departures from that vision. That colours his account. How could it not! Josephus has a double angle: he’s a Jew writing for a Roman audience that was often suspicious of Jews, and he’s also conscious of defending is own reputation after siding with the Romans in the war. And he famously exaggerates—he’ll say things like the smallest village in Galilee had 15,000 people! There’s no way that’s true. But he doesn’t seem to make things up. Time and time again, historians and archaeologists find a solid core of fact in the things Josephus tells us. So, it’s complicated … But Josephus remains an extraordinarily valuable source.Just how valuable? We’ll explore—after the break 

Media – CNN Clip 

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s from a rather dramatic-sounding CNN documentary from 2015 called Finding Jesus. It focused on the so-called James Ossuary—a first-century limestone bone box inscribed, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The box itself is genuine, but the inscription has sparked debate. Some top experts think it’s original (Joseph Fitzmyer, for example); others suspect it was added later, or at least “brother of Jesus” was added later. No firm verdict yet, though it’s probably best not to include it in our dataset of evidence for Jesus.  That said, the scholarly jury has delivered its verdict on another reference to “James, brother of Jesus”—one found in the writings of Josephus. Josephus mentions Jesus twice in his big work titled Antiquities of the Jews. Once in section 18 and once in section 20. It’s this second one that mentions Jesus only to name-check his less well-known brother: 

Reading

Because Ananas was of this [persuasion], he considered he had a fitting opportunity since Festus had died and Albinus was still on his way. He assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and, bringing before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and certain others, he made an accusation against them as breakers of the law, and delivered them over to be stoned. 

 

TC Schmidt:
This is a fascinating passage. Like you said, it’s very brief, but you can wring a lot of good details out of it. It describes the high priest Ananus II calling James the brother of Jesus to be executed and he sets up a Sanhedrin. He has James and a few others executed illegally, and he’s defrocked. He’s removed from the high priesthood by the Romans. What’s interesting here, number one, he mentions Jesus. He mentions the brother of Jesus as well. And he also indicates if you, if you read, you know, between the lines that James was apparently of very significant standing in Jerusalem around 62 AD when this event happens. And this is, uh, we know this for several reasons. One, because it’s apparent that the high priest, the most important Jewish leader, uh, amongst the Jews at the time was willing to risk his high priesthood to have James illegally executed. And that tells us that James must have been a threat. He must have been leading a very significant movement in Jerusalem that the high priest disagreed with. And then secondly, Josephus tells us that it wasn’t that the Romans got wind of this illegal execution, and they thought, well, you’re breaking our laws, we’re gonna remove the high priest who did this. Instead what Josephus says is that some of the Jews were so upset at this that they appealed to the Romans and got the high priest removed. So that’s another indication that there is a very significant movement of, of either Christians or people who are at least sympathetic to the Jesus movement in Jerusalem in 62 AD, which is of course 30 years after Jesus’ death. The movement is still being led by someone who knew Jesus personally. It’s a remarkable, remarkable passage.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Uh, when I read that, that little line that, you know: “The honourable amongst us were disgusted at what Ananus II did”. Um, I, I think of that little  passing passage in Acts chapter two that says that the, the, the Jewish, the Jewish Christian community, uh, in Jerusalem in those early days won the favor of all the people, meaning the wider Jerusalem, not, uh, not meaning Christians, but the wider Jerusalem.

Media – Richard Carrier tape

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s historian and author Richard Carrier. He’s best known for arguing that Jesus never existed as a historical figure–that the whole thing is a myth. It’s a fringe view, but he’s built a significant online following around it. Carrier, of course, doubts the references to Jesus in Josephus. He represents one of three main positions scholars take on Josephus’ first reference to Jesus—about 90 words in Antiquities Book 18, known as the Testimonium Flavianum. Position one (Carrier’s position): the whole passage is a later Christian forgery. Maybe 10-20% of experts go with that. Position two: the passage is entirely authentic. Very, very few scholars have gone this way. Maybe 5-10%!! And that’s because Position three seemed really persuasive: This is the view that Josephus wrote a neutral or maybe even slightly critical remark about Jesus which was later cleaned up by a Christian scribe copying out Josephus’ works in a monastery sometime in late antiquity. That’s where most historians sit today. I’d say 80%. And that’s where I’ve also sat for my entire teaching career. To refresh our memory, here’s the full passage again but this time I’ll get our voice actor Yannick Lawry to ham up the bits that, according to the majority of experts, were added by a later naughty Christian scribe—the rest, they say, is genuine:

Reading

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. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Let me talk manuscripts for a moment. For time’s sake, we’ve cut Tom’s amazing discussion of the many different kinds of manuscript copies we have of Josephus’ works and, in particular, this important paragraph we call the Testimonium Flavianum. Josephus wrote in the first century–no one doubts that–but our earliest complete copies of Antiquities of the Jews—containing our paragraph—date from the 10th and 11th centuries. That might sound bizarre but it’s actually pretty normal. I mean, the earliest copy we have of Tacitus—the greatest source of imperial Rome—comes from exactly the say time … 10th/11th century. Fortunately, though, we also have tons of quotations of Josephus from much earlier writings—some as early as the 4th century—in Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian. Translation involves interpretation, and when it comes to the Testimonium Flavianum, scholars have pored over every word, every letter, across centuries and languages. Tom’s work compiling and analysing all those manuscripts and quotations is nothing short of mind-bending. When I talk to a scholar like Tom, I really just feel like a podcaster who happened to get a PhD once!!

 

John Dickson:
Yeah. All right. So there’s a lot of things to play with. Uh, I can hardly imagine the time you spent looking at all the different ones, But the fact is, some scholars, from time to time, have rejected this whole passage as, uh, an insertion from some naughty scribe who wanted to, uh, uh, point people to Jesus. What is that view based on – the view that it’s entirely made up.

TC Schmidt:
That view is a minority view these days. The majority view is that Josephus wrote something like The Passage, but it’s been tampered with. But the view that it’s, it’s a wholesale forgery. Um, what they’ll say is they’ll say that there’s claims that are made in the passage about Jesus that no non-Christian could ever, ever make. And uh, they’ll list those claims and they’ll also then take the next step usually, and they’ll say that the style of the passage also does not match Josephus style, but it happens to match Eusebius of Caesarea, who’s the first person to quote the passage. So, they’ll claim that Eusebius was the one who forged this wholesale in around the year 311, 312. He stuck it in the manuscripts of The Antiquities, and that percolated throughout the manuscript tradition. That’s the typical argument. Um, I, I have a whole chapter, an appendix in my book, uh, addressing this.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Um. But as you mentioned, the, the broad scholarly consensus for maybe the last 40 years, um, has been that Josephus probably did write a short notice about Jesus there in book 18, but that, uh, a later Christian scribe improved it. So, can you, uh, describe for us that view, take, take, uh, remembering that our voice actor will have read the standard, uh, edition of Josephus.

TC Schmidt:
That view. Uh, Originally a hundred years ago, the major view was that the whole thing was forged. But there was a scholar, uh, called Henry Thackaray, very eminent Greek translator who started composing a lexicon of the works of Josephus, his tracking, his vocabulary and things like that. And he realized that there were just so many passages, so many phrases within the Testimonium Flavianum that matched Josephus phrases elsewhere that he felt like it was impossible for this to be forged. It sounds so much like Josephus. And he changed his mind. He said, I used to think this was forged. I no longer do. Scholars have, have almost universally accepted that view that there, there is just so much about the passage that sounds like Josephus, that there’s no way a forger, even a skilled forger could have come up with with this. However, there still are some areas that just seem too good to be true. They’re too pro-Christian. They’re too positive about Jesus, and they say Jesus is the Messiah. These passages say that he was resurrected. He fulfilled prophecy. He worked miracles. So they will say: We think that Josephus wrote something very similar to this passage, and it’s been doctored. Some words have been switched slightly, and there’s been slight alterations that have had large effects on the passage.

John Dickson:
Let’s, um, sort of hover there with that standard scholarly view, which by the way, I’ve taught for 20 years until you, uh, ruined my day, uh, by writing this book. Um. Let, let’s sort of just hover there for a second. Um, the reasons people, uh, reject this, and I want you to just respond, uh, to the view that, that some lines clearly have been doctored. And one is you’ve mentioned already that the, the, the paragraph, um, interrupts the flow of book 18 of Josephus. It just sticks out like a sore thumb.

TC Schmidt:
People say that I disagree. Uh, what’s happening in book 18 is Josephus is talking about the governorship of Pontius Pilate, and he’s listing various disturbances, uprising, salacious, terrible things that happened during Pi pilot’s reign. So it’s a list of five or six stories. Embedded in that list – one of the stories is the Testimonium Flavianum. And it fits much better in that list than some of the other stories. Josephus begins with two stories about Jews appealing to Pontius Pilate over some incident, some issue that’s happening. And the third story is the Testimonium Flavianum where again, Jews are appealing to Pontius Pilate, in this case, to have Jesus executed. That fits perfectly. I mean, there’s nothing that is odd about that. If you continue in the list though, things do get a little odd. You know? The next story is this salacious story… that has nothing to do with Jews or Judaism about, you know, someone tricking a woman to sleep with her for one night as a pretend God.It’s this ridiculous story.  Another story’s about Uh, Samaritans, it doesn’t have to do with Jews. There’s another story that doesn’t have to do with Pontius Pilate. So I actually think the placement of the story fits remarkably well. Um, it’s also placed before Josephus talks about John the Baptist, uh, which just does not seem like any Christian who is in the habit of forging a passage like this would ever put Jesus before John the Baptist.

John Dickson:
No way. Because if he was anything, he was the forerunner, right? John’s a Baptist. 

John Dickson (Studio)

John the Baptist is a key figure in the Gospels—the prophet who prepared the way for Jesus and even baptised him. In Christian tradition, John always comes before Jesus. But in Josephus, John appears after Jesus. Whoever wrote the Testimonium Flavianum clearly wasn’t trying to make John look like a forerunner of Christ. It’s a small detail, but it strongly suggests the passage wasn’t written by a later Christian editor.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But is the story too brief? 90 words come on.

TC Schmidt:
It is brief. It is brief. People say that. I don’t think so. If you look at what Josephus does when he talks about religious figures, he’s painfully uninterested in telling us about them. Uh, he tells us more about Jesus than he does about the high priests in the first century, many high priests. He tells us more about Jesus than he does about the leaders of the Sanhedrin. He tells us more about Jesus than the leaders of the Pharisees. Some of these people, Josephus personally knew and were enormously influential, and he tells us sometimes almost nothing. He’ll just mention their names.

John Dickson:
Okay, then it’s too long.

TC Schmidt:
Well, uh, I have to say that it’s not too long because the other stories that are mentioned within that rubric, you know, the half dozen stories about the reign of Pontius Pilate, it fits well in, uh, in terms of the length. It’s, it’s a little bit shorter than average, but, um, it’s closer to the average than one of the other stories. So I think it, it actually sounds much like what Josephus would’ve said.

John Dickson:
Okay. Okay. Let’s get a little more technical then. Um, what about the, the claim that there are too many unusual or unique words in those 90 word, in the 90 word paragraph, or unusual verbal forms here that it can’t have come from Josephus.

TC Schmidt:
Scholars will say that, uh, for instance, Josephus uses a word in the passage that he doesn’t use anywhere else, and that has been pointed out by scholars as a marker for inauthenticity. You know, Josephus wrote half a million words. What are the chances that there would be a word in here he never uses elsewhere? The irony here is that the word happens to be the word Christian, so if anyone was going to be talking about Jesus, that would be a word that they would probably use. In my book, what I do is a statistical analysis and I rank all the vocabulary of Josephus. I’m only able to do this because of contemporary databases. Otherwise, you know, this is an impossible task on my own. That’s why no scholars have done this before,

John Dickson:
Well, Thackaray gave it a a good go, right?

TC Schmidt:
He gave it a whirl, but he couldn’t, you know, manually collating all these is just is, is impossible.

John Dickson (Studio)

You might be wondering: if the Testimonium Flavianum is so famous—and so debated—why hasn’t this kind of research been done before? Basically, because the technology’s only just caught up. Stylistic analysis now lets scholars create a kind of “linguistic fingerprint,” tracing an author’s favourite words and syntactical habits to confirm authorship. And the more manuscripts we have, the better the data. Just in 2020, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, digitised a twelfth-century copy of The Antiquities of the Jews—adding one more piece to the puzzle. Stylometrics isn’t just being done on ancient texts. Over at Northeastern University in Boston researchers are using the same techniques to test whether Little Women author Louisa May Alcott wrote a series of anonymous gothic tales under the name, “E. H. Gould.” They’re digitising 19th-century magazines and running the texts through algorithms that identify each writer’s linguistic “fingerprint.” Link in the shownotes! It’s cool stuff. It’s exactly what Tom Schmidt’s done with the writings of Josephus—in multiple languages!!

TC Schmidt:
So, it turns out when you run the numbers, Josephus has an enormous vocabulary. He uses a unique word, every 87 words on average, and the passage is 90 words long. So having a unique word is actually what we would expect. That’s an argument for authenticity, not against authenticity. You can make the same kinds of arguments from word frequency rates with all the other rare words in the passage. I, I show that the frequency rate of rare words, and there are some rare words in the passage, but those are deployed at the same rate we would expect, uh, given Josephus’ habit. The same goes for common words. Uh, you know, words like the, and, and are extremely common. Everyone has a unique pattern by which we deploy those kinds of words. And if you have a sufficient data set, you can figure out, you know, this person tends to use the word the so many times every a hundred words, every 90 words. Josephus in this passage uses those common words at the same rate that he does elsewhere. All of this, all of this just sounds like Josephus. It doesn’t look like the passage has been interpolated.

John Dickson:
Then there are the, uh, several expressions that sounds to many of us that they cannot have come from a non-Christian Jew. Let’s take them in turn and tell me how you, um, how you read them. I mean, after calling Jesus a wise man, it says, “If indeed one can call him a man”, surely that’s some naughty scribe going, ‘No, Jesus is divine – How dare you Josephus say he was just a wise man!’

TC Schmidt:
That’s how many have read it. That’s how I read it too. And one thing I’ll, I’ll say is that if we just take it literally, and we take it as him suggesting Jesus might have been more than a man, uh, this isn’t, you know, there, there are non-Christians in antiquity who did do such things. Um, we have no…. People often default to a position where a first century Jew must either be neatly sliced into a binary of hating Jesus or thinking he’s the divine son of God. That is simply not how first century Jews works. There’s a whole spectrum of belief about Jesus and so. You know, a Jew wondering about the, the status of Jesus is not necessarily calls for suspicion. Uh, note that Josephus isn’t saying he’s divine: He’s wondering about this. However, if you look at the actual Greek of this passage, you can read this as an insult. Uh, that’s because the phrase, you know, “if it’s fitting to call him a man” is used by other Greek authors as a derogatory remark to, to demean someone’s morals, to question if they’re, if it’s fitting to call them a man. And that word man, um, it’s not the Greek word for human anthropos, it’s [Greek] So more indicating maleness manliness. So he could be making a dig at Jesus’ status as a. You know, virtuous man. Uh, and I, I think that’s how many people, how many ancients who quote the passage understood that phrase. They don’t seem to have thought it was this naked profession of faith in Jesus, or this obviously complimentary statement. They, they seem to be much more cagey about it. And I think it is cagey. I think it’s sort of skeptical. Uh. Either Josephus isn’t quite sure what to make about Jesus or he’s being, he’s giving a dig at Jesus. I think it’s one or two of those options.

John Dickson:
But then it says he was [GREEK] the Messiah. Surely that’s, that’s made up.

TC Schmidt:
Yes. Well, there’s a couple things I’ll say about that one. What’s interesting here is if we imagine a Christian inserting that phrase then we’re stuck with a puzzling situation because the phrase says, Jesus was the Christ. Not that Jesus is the Christ. And that is an important, there’s only a difference in tense there. Past tense verse, present tense. But, uh the core Christian belief is not that Jesus was the Christ and he’s dead now and no longer exists, it’s that he is currently the living Christ. Um, it suggests that Jesus was dead, uh, that he’s not around anymore. It’s just an odd thing for a Christian to manufacture. Um, what I think is going on there is in the Greek manuscripts and witness textual witnesses, we have. The phrase reads, he was the Christ. But in that ancient Latin translation I mentioned by Jerome from 393, it says something different there. It says “he was believed to be the Christ.” Uh, in the ancient Syriac translation I mentioned. Um. In one of these translations, it also says something different. It says “He was thought to be the Christ.” So these two ancient translations parallel each other. What’s curious is that in that second passage about Jesus, that Josephus writes about James, the brother of Jesus, he doesn’t say “Jesus was the Christ.” He says “Jesus was called the Christ.” So you have, uh, these two ancient translations that match one another roughly, and they also seem to match roughly how Josephus refers to Jesus elsewhere and in the field of textual criticism that the field of. You know, this is how scholars assemble ancient texts. They get all the, all the textual witnesses, translations, quotations,  manuscripts, and they put it all together. This is just … normal textual criticism would look at a situation like this and say, obviously the Latin and Syriac translations witness to the original reading…

John Dickson:
Because these were Christian translations and what Christian is going to demote Jesus by saying “he was called” instead of “he was”. So are you suggesting the original Greek actually had called like it, like it does, uh, in, uh, book 20 in reference to, uh, James brother of Jesus called Christ.

TC Schmidt:
It could have, it could have been called [Legina] in, in Greek. It could have been [past, uh, past amanos] or something, I believe. Um, it could have, it could have been a number of other Greek synonyms, but something that indicates Jesus was only considered to be

John Dickson:
So did a naughty scribe drop out that one word in this passage? Uh, is that your theory?

TC Schmidt:
That’s the question. Uh, traditionally people think yes. An unscrupulous scribe decided to just carefully omit the phrase, you know, whatever the phrase was, “was called”, “was thought”, “was considered the Christ”. But there, there is, uh, some problems with thinking. It was a conscious, uh, omission. And one is what I’ve said before, that it uses the past tense. You would think that the scribe would’ve just said, “is”. A second reason is that if this was intentional, it was  almost a singular failure, and that’s because this passage is quoted by Greek authors, you know, 18, 19 times in antiquity. Only once amongst the 18 or 19 times that this passage is quoted does one of those authors go on to say, “Josephus calls Jesus the Christ here.” All the others do not say that there. There’s a couple that are a little ambiguous. It’s unclear. But what this means is that someone, you would have to argue that some scribe intentionally made this change and the change was then not noticed by so many other people who continued to assume that Josephus was not a Christian.

John Dickson:
Indeed, um, Origen, the, the great, uh, third century writer, doesn’t he not explicitly say Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Christ. This is sometimes used as an argument for why that passage was never there. But what you are saying is that may better be explained by the fact that Origen’s version had something that indicated Josephus didn’t really believe he is the Christ.

TC Schmidt:
Precisely. A passage that just said he was thought to be or he was considered to be the Christ.

John Dickson (Studio)

This might sound complicated—and that’s because it is! Origen was a third-century Christian writer who had access to one of the great libraries of the ancient world, in Caesarea on the coast of Israel. He had a copy of Josephus. Origen explicitly says Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Christ. Some take that to mean the Testimonium Flavianum—the paragraph that calls Jesus “the Christ”—couldn’t have been in Origen’s copy. So, they argue, it must have been added later, sometime after the 200s AD. But Tom Schmidt points out something that should have been obvious: maybe Origen’s copy didn’t say “he was the Christ” at all, but “he was believed to be the Christ,” or “he was called the Christ.” And that’s exactly the wording we find in some later Latin and Syriac manuscripts. Since no Christian translator would have made Josephus sound less sure about Jesus, the simplest explanation is that Josephus’ original Greek said something like “called Christ.” Somewhere along the way—through accident or editing—that one little Greek verb dropped out, leaving copies that read “he was Christ.” I hope that’s clearer than mud!

John Dickson:
Okay. But surely the hardest one, you can’t get around this one, Tom, come on that Josephus then says. Um, after three days, Jesus appeared to them alive, just as the prophets had said all sorts of wonderful things about him.

TC Schmidt:
It seems that way, doesn’t it? It seems like this open confession of faith in the resurrection and an affirmation that Jesus fulfilled Hebrew prophecy, none of which seems likely for Josephus to have said as a non-Christian. The, the, the key thing about this passage is the word appear. That’s the word [GREEK] in Greek. And when I was doing stylistic analysis of Josephus and I was looking to see if Josephus uses the same words and phrases elsewhere, I came to this passage and I’m looking to see does he use the same, you know, combination of words we see in this in the Testimonium Flavianum here, does he use it elsewhere? And it turns out he does. He do uses [GREEK] and similar constructs elsewhere. And when you look at how he deploys it, it’s very interesting because he will often use [GREEK] not to mean appear – as in physically be obvious and present themselves to someone. He will use it to mean seem – Or appear to be so, but not actually so. And there’s a, uh, the, probably the, the, the best example of this is when Josephus is retelling. The famous and terrible story, uh, the old in the Old Testament of Joseph being sold into slavery by his own brothers, who then take his cloak and they have to tell their father what happened to their brother. They don’t wanna tell ’em what they really did. So they, they put animals’, blood on the cloak, and they bring the cloak to their father. And Josephus describes this as they bring it to their father Jacob, and they show him the bloodied cloak. So that quote, “it would seem to him that Joseph was killed by beasts.” He uses the same exact grammatical construction with [GREEK] plus the, uh, the technical term as a partisan with the date, just like he does in the Testimonium Flavianum. He obviously means: It only seemed to Jacob that Joseph had been killed by beast because he wasn’t dead at  all. He had been sold into slavery. And there’s several examples of this. This is how a Greek grammars, uh, describe how the word can be used. This is not, you know, an ad hoc solution that I’m developing out of nowhere. This is a, a legitimate way to interpret it. It’s also how ancient Christians took the passage, because again, we’ve got those 19 folks who quote the passage and again, and again and again, the, the vast majority do not report that Josephus in their commentary, their comments on the passage. They don’t say, ‘Hey, look, he says Jesus was actually resurrected.’ Um, they just ignore this aspect of it, even though it would’ve aided their arguments immensely to, to use Josephus as a… in this regard to say Josephus, uh, Jesus actually was resurrected. So I think clearly Josephus means to say not that Jesus appeared to them alive again after three days, but that Jesus appeared to them to be alive after three days. And that whole thing about the prophets is subordinated to, the words seem or appear to be that it seemed to them he was alive again because of their understanding of prophecy or what have you.

John Dickson:
Yeah, so he’s really just reporting the Christian belief in the resurrection and fulfillment of prophecy. And the verb he uses, uh, tends toward a slightly negative, uh, tenor. Is it what you’re saying? That, that it’s, uh, that it’s a, something that seems to be the case but probably isn’t or might not be?

TC Schmidt:
Yeah, it’s something that seem is a good, is a good synonym for us, that it seemed to them that he was alive again, implying that Josephus does not think he was alive again. He thinks they were mistaken. Uh, it’s hard to capture the, the finer meanings of it. Um, there is, you know, some hint in this, in this word that, uh. the disciples thought that Jesus appeared to them, but Josephus doesn’t think that that actually happened. They, they, they are reporting what they believe they have visibly observed, but Josephus doesn’t think that’s the case. Much like how Jacob with the cloak of his son Joseph bloodied, is visibly seen something but misinterpreting what he has seen to, to come up with something false.

John Dickson (Studio)

What’s groundbreaking about Tom’s work is that he offers a completely plausible reading of the Testimonium Flavianum—the whole thing—as genuinely written by Josephus. So far, I’m about 78 percent convinced. But that raises the obvious question—one that could either strengthen or weaken our confidence: where did Josephus get his information? I often tell my students that one of the key questions for any historical source is this: was the author in a position to know what they’re talking about? You can have a coherent account of alleged facts, but if the writer didn’t have access to reliable information, it’s hard to treat it as real history. So how did Josephus know anything about Jesus? That’s after the break.

Media – The Two Ronnies

John Dickson (Studio)

This is part of a skit from the 1970s UK sketch comedy show The Two Ronnies…. A bit of indulgent name-dropping at a dinner party. It’s an almost perfect example of comic timing and social satire. 

Media – The Two Ronnies

John Dickson (Studio)

Josephus was pretty well connected—both to Jewish elites back in Judaea and to Roman elites in his new home—and he was a bit of a name-dropper. That might make us cringe a little all these years later, but Josephus lived in a world that didn’t value humility the way we do. His name-dropping, though, is historical gold. It gives us a window into people and events we might never have known about otherwise.

 

John Dickson:
Okay. That’s the nerdy style of metrics and Greek analysis, but one of the most remarkable parts of your research, um, you actually traced Josephus personal acquaintance with the very people, the very priestly family that was involved in handing Jesus over to the Romans and indeed executing James 30 years later. Uh, this was incredibly fascinating. I, I, I, I was reading it and I was thinking, why did no one do this before? So can you outline for us, as you know, as briefly, but clearly as you can, uh. What are Josephus’ direct connections with this important family in Jerusalem?

TC Schmidt:
Josephus was a man of enormous interpersonal connections. He knew all sorts of people. I mentioned. He was from an eminent priestly family. He was also from a family descending from Kings as well. And he tells us, he writes an autobiography, and in his autobiography he, you know, name drops all sorts of people that he. And he knew high priests personally. 

Reading

By my mother I am of the royal blood. For the children of Asamoneus, from whom that family was derived, had both the office of the High Priesthood, and the dignity of a King for a long time together. I will accordingly set down my progenitors in order. My grandfather’s father was named Simon, with the addition of Psellus. He lived at the same time with that son of Simon the High Priest, who first of all the High Priests was named Hyrcanus. This Simon Psellus had nine sons. One of which was Matthias, called Ephlias. He married the daughter of Jonathan, the High Priest. Which Jonathan was the first of the sons of Asamoneus, who was High Priest, and was the brother of Simon the High Priest also.
‘The Life of Flavius Josephus’, by Josephus.

 

TC Schmidt:
He knew the head of the Sanhedrin. Uh, he knew, he knew her grip of ii the last king of the Jews. He was friends with him, actually. Um, and his commander, his direct commander in the Jewish War, it turns out, was a gentleman named Annas II. Annas II was the high priest who had James, the brother of Jesus executed. Josephus knows the man who killed Jesus’, brother. Annas II Josephus Commander, uh, was a member of the most powerful family in Jerusalem. It was a family that supplied six or seven, depending on how you count high priests in the first century, perhaps more. And there’s only about, you know, 15, 16 of these guys. So this family is, is enormously influential and Annas’ the second father. So Joseph’s Commander – Annas II – his father is Annas the high priest who in the gospels supervises the trial of Jesus as, I guess we would call it high priest emeritus. He’s sort of the former high priest who still has a whole lot of power.

John Dickson:
Alongside Caiaphas, right?

TC Schmidt:
And Caiaphas is the brother-in-law of Josephus’ commander as well. So Josephus is quite well connected to this family who was intimately involved in the Jesus movement. The, the, the father and brother-in-law of his commander had Jesus executed and his commander had Jesus’ brother executed. And, uh. Josephus is related to others as well. Uh, for instance, he knows the head of the Sanhedrin Simon, who’s the head of the Sanhedrin around the sixties. Simon’s father is Gamaliel, who’s mentioned in the book of Acts, rabbi Gamaliel early on, who, who supervises the trial of the apostles. And there Peter says to the Sanhedrin and Gamaliel, you murdered Jesus. Uh, Gamaliel surely was at the Sanhedrin trial of Jesus. And so this is another connection. Josephus knows another person whose father had Jesus crucified.

John Dickson (Studio)

Just a reminder: the Sanhedrin was the Jewish ruling council—about seventy members based in Jerusalem—overseeing religious, political, and judicial matters. Rome recognised its authority but limited its power, especially in cases involving capital punishment. In the Gospels, Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin’s leaders, the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, and is accused of blasphemy. They couldn’t impose the death penalty, but they handed Jesus over to the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate who could … and did.  So when Josephus mentions the “first men” accusing Jesus, these are the people he means—the high priest, chief priests, and elders of the Sanhedrin. Josephus often says he met with the “first men” of Jerusalem, and given how soon he was writing after these events, it’s entirely possible he knew some who were there at Jesus’ trial. In fact, Tom says it’s likely. 

John Dickson:
You even proposed that an Ananus II was old enough, uh, by 62. Um. when he, um, executed James, uh, to have actually been an adult in 30, back in 30, back in the time of, uh, Jesus. Talk us through that.

TC Schmidt:
I think so. Uh, Ananus II died around 68 or 69 AD. He died during the Jewish war. And Josephus tells us on two occasions that Ananus II was the oldest of the chief priests. And needless to say, you do not become the oldest of the chief priest without being very, very old. And, and if he was the oldest of the chief priest in 69 AD it’s quite easy to estimate that he clearly would’ve been in his seventies, maybe eighties by, by the standards of the ancient world. That means he would’ve been in his thirties, maybe even forties when Jesus was executed. So when his own father and brother-in-law were interrogating Jesus, uh, he would’ve been a full-fledged adult. He would’ve been one of the most powerful men in Jerusalem of this ama…, this, this high ranking priestly family. The question I ask in my book is, can we place Ananus II the Commander of Josephus – Can we place him at the trial of Jesus? We know he was old enough to be there. We know his father conducted the trial. We know his brother-in-law, Caiaphas was also at the trial, but was he at the trial? And I think the answer is yes, I think he was. And, uh, there’s several lines of evidence for this. Um, one is that Josephus mentions in the Testimonium Flavianum that it was the first men among us who had Jesus executed and then elsewhere, Josephus says, many times I knew the first men, I knew them. And it’s only plausible that if, if he says the first men did this and then later says he knew the first men that he plausibly knew some people at the trial, some people who were involved. So that’s one hint. Um, the other one though has to do with Jewish law. If you look at when Jesus was handed over to the Sanhedrin, it was on the evening of Passover, and Passover is a pilgrimage festival. All faithful Jews are required by Jewish law to come to Jerusalem. That’s why Jesus is in Jerusalem. He’s there for the Passover. To come to Jerusalem to get a Passover lamb and eat it with your patriarch, the patriarch of your family. And you’re supposed to be in the residence of your patriarch and spend the night there. And this is to re-enact the first Passover where God sends this destroyer over the Jewish people. They’re supposed to put blood on their doorposts. They’re not supposed to leave the house of their family patriarch, otherwise they’ll be killed by this destroyer. So they’re commemorating this and. And, uh, what this means, if you put the pieces together, is that Josephus, his commander on the evening of Passover, would’ve been in the house of his father celebrating the Passover meal and spending the night. And if you read the gospels, where was Jesus brought for trial? He was brought to the house of Anas, the father of Josephus Commander. So I argue that Josephus commander would’ve been required to be there in the house of his father on the evening of Passover at the precise time and place Jesus was brought.

John Dickson:
The, um, bottom line of all of this is that the usual suggestion of scholars that if Josephus had written about Jesus, he got his information from broad rumor in Rome, um, really from Christian propaganda, whereas you, you have set a firm ground to say there’s no reason to suspect he didn’t get this from “the first man among us.”

TC Schmidt:
I totally agree. Yeah. Uh, in my book, I go through about 10 possible candidates of … Jew… famous Jews whom we know, one of whom is Ananus, a second, another is Gamaliel. But there’s others that I mention. Uh, Josephus has, when you start looking at his social network connections, uh. He has extraordinary access to the circle of Jesus, uh, to Jesus’ enemies. For instance, he’s connected to Herodius, uh, and Salame, the woman who danced for the head of John the baptist. He has connections with them. He may have known Salima directly. Uh, there’s many other examples of this that I bring forward. So indeed he is not presenting an account of Jesus based on hearsay or rumor. He’s embedded in Jerusalem in the thirties, forties, and fifties. He knows the movers and shakers. He knows the people and the families who are involved in the execution of Jesus. In fact, um, all of the four named Jewish individuals who are responsible for the death of Jesus in the New Testament. So this is, uh, Anas the high priest, Caiaphas, the high priest, uh, Herod Agrippa II and Gamaliel, Josephus knows the families of each one of those, uh, potentially knows members of the family who were at, uh, the trial of Jesus. So you’re talking about a man with extraordinary access to the enemies of Jesus. This means that what he has to tell us about the Jesus of history is of immense worth to us as historians.

John Dickson (Studio)

It’s the combination of insights that makes Tom Schmidt’s research so potentially significant. He’s probed the most plausible original text of the Testimonium Flavianum and he’s untangled Josephus’ amazing web of connections with the very Jerusalem elites who were present at both Jesus’ trial and the later death of Jesus’ half-brother James. Tom argues that Josephus’ account of Jesus comes not from Christians he might have known but from the men who dominated Jewish life in Jerusalem from the 20s AD right through to the 60s AD. Josephus’ own complex relationships with Romans, Jewish leaders, and possibly some Christians meant that when he penned a paragraph or two about the controversial figure of Jesus he had multiple audiences (and motives) in mind. This alone accounts for the highly ambiguous nature of the famous Testimonium Flavianum. And with all this in mind, here is Tom Schmidt’s final reconstruction and translation of this crucially important paragraph:

Reading

And in this time, there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who receive truisms with pleasure. And he brought over many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was [thought to be] the Christ. And, when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who at first were devoted to him did not cease to be so, for on the third day it seemed to them that he was alive again 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. 

John Dickson:
We’re gonna have a voice actor read out your final translation, your final reconstruction. Uh, can you, uh, the English construction, the. Um, can you sort of briefly tell us as commentary what you think Josephus is and isn’t saying about the figure.

TC Schmidt:
First he places Jesus in the time of Pontius Pilate and the high priesthood of Caiaphas, exactly what the gospels proclaim. uh, He says that Jesus was a teacher. He says that he was a wise man. Now that word wise to us is, is positive. In, in Greek, this could indicate just being a, a philosopher or a religious teacher, someone who’s clever or sharp. Um, he says that Jesus was known for working miracles. He actually says he worked miracles and, uh, this is common in Jewish hostile accounts of Jesus. Um, so he views Jesus as a miracle worker. He says he had many disciples. He says he was thought to be the Christ or somehow considered to be the Christ. He says that the first men among us accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate and that Pontius Pilate handed Jesus over to death to be crucified. And then he says that the disciples though, did not abandon Jesus. They did not give up. But that three days later, it seemed to them that he was alive again in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, and that the Christians, the tribe of the Christians, still existed. So, what this tells us, uh, also is that that story about the resurrection of Jesus was not, according to Josephus, was not something that developed generations later. Uh, according to Josephus, this is something that occurred on the third day where the disciples were claiming this, that Jesus was alive again. The same goes for the miracles of Jesus. That this, these Josephus does not view these as, you know, later legendary developments necessarily. He thinks he, he reports them as if they happened. This is all the more remarkable because Josephus is very capable of critiquing charlatans, pretend magicians, false prophets.

John Dickson:
But he doesn’t call them signs or powers the way Christians referred to them. He, he, he called them [paradox at ergo] baff baffling weird deeds.

TC Schmidt:
Shocking. Yes. He uses the Greek has many words for miracles, and he doesn’t use the positive ones. He uses [Paradoxa]. We might translate it as paranormal deeds, something where it’s supernatural, but there is something about it. Where is this coming from? Is it demonic? Is it malevolent? Who, how is he doing this? Uh, so he’s suspicious, uh, not so much of whether they’re supernatural, but whether they are divine or from a malevolent source.

John Dickson:
I was really intrigued by your sort of conclusion. Trying to wrap it all up. You, you’re not necessarily saying Josephus is trying to be neutral. Um, or critical. Or positive. He’s not undecided necessarily about Jesus. I was intrigued by your suggestion that perhaps because Josephus has so many concerns about what his readers will think of what he’s saying, and he probably knows that the tribe of the Christians were a point of some controversy, um, that he uses language that is … deliberately able to be interpreted neutrally or negatively or even at points positively? Is that what you feel?

TC Schmidt:
I’m not the only one who theorizes this. Uh, there’s other scholars who’ve theorized this in the past that Josephus is being intentionally cagey or a bit ambiguous about this. This is something he does elsewhere. He will often keep his cards close to the vest, so to speak. Uh, he obviously is not being openly positive about Jesus, but he also is not being openly critical either. Uh, his words are, are ambiguous enough that, that you kind of read them and, and you scratch your head thinking, well, what does he really think about this Jesus guy? And I think he did that intentionally. And whether it was because he himself just didn’t know, he didn’t know how he felt about Jesus or because he, he knows that his audience is divided. He, maybe he disagrees with his audience. So, he just wants to sort of give an account that will, uh, you know, it’s a political maneuver where he’s trying to say what happened, but he doesn’t want to give a judgment necessarily on it. So he, he just describes it in these terms, and this is common to Josephus. He will do this elsewhere. So regarding what he, he himself, his estimation of Jesus, whether he thinks Jesus was a good guy or a bad guy, uh, I would say he either is cagey enough to not tell us, or he himself doesn’t, doesn’t really know.

John Dickson (Studio)

Since reading Tom’s book a month or so ago, I’ve already had to rethink a few things. I was teaching a doctoral class on the history of Jesus here at Wheaton College last month, and my lecture on Josephus suddenly needed some fast editing. For years, I’ve walked students through the standard view: Josephus’s paragraph about Jesus isn’t a total forgery, but it’s not completely original either. Most scholars say that if you delete three lines—the one about him hardly being a man, the one calling him the Christ, and the one about being raised from the dead—you’re left with a neutral statement that likely came from Josephus himself. This time, though, I added something new. After laying out the usual material, I said to my students, “I might actually be wrong about all this.” Hi to any of you listening, by the way—you’ve got your exam in a week! Good luck. Anyway, I told them I might’ve been wrong for the last 25 years of teaching. I explained Tom’s findings and said I’m about 78% convinced he’s right. I even predicted that scholarship will probably reassess the Testimonium Flavianum in light of his work. Tom may not convince everyone—but if I’m any indication, he might partly convince many. So what’s my remaining 22% of doubt? A few small linguistic quibbles—mostly around the phrase paradoxa erga (“baffling deeds”)—but if I’m honest, most of that hesitation isn’t intellectual. It’s sociological. I’ve spent my career trying to keep my teaching about the historical Jesus within the mainstream of scholarship, not apologetics. Accepting Tom’s analysis would be a step outside that mainstream—for now at least—and that makes me nervous. But even as I say that, I know it’s not a great reason to resist such a compelling argument. My doubts are psychological, not logical. So, I suppose I’ll just have to admit it: I’m a work in progress. I wrapped up my time with Tom by asking him a few bigger questions about his approach and what his findings might mean.

John Dickson:
A recent review, um, of your book from a well-known Christian publication. Described it something like the most important work of apologetics in a decade. And when I read that, I get the heebie-jeebies because we have a tradition here at Undeceptions of being a little bit, um, cautious about mere apologetics, an industry that is sometimes known for using any old argument – even bad ones to promote the Christian cause. Uh, I know that’s not what the reviewer meant. They meant it positively because in America that word still has currency. But I guess I wanna ask maybe on behalf of my skeptical listeners, do you see your book as merely a work of apologetics or a genuine historical, philological, scholarly contribution?

TC Schmidt:
My intent is for this to be a historical contribution to the study of the historical Jesus, and to an extent the study of first century Judaism. Uh, I set out in this book  believing that the passage was not authentic, that it had been tampered with, and I changed my mind in the face of evidence. Um. The book is published with Oxford University Press, it passed peer review, multiple times anonymous peer review by, by, uh, other scholars, very accomplished scholars. The, the book has advanced blurbs from scholars who are not Christian apologists

John Dickson:
I’ll say! I’m looking at it right here in my hand.

TC Schmidt:
You know, they’re, they’re at Harvard Divinity and Yale Divinity School and Princeton University. Uh, these are not places known for Christian apologetics by any means. And, um, I’m trying to subject it to scholarly review, though there’ll be a, uh, a. book review panel on the book by some esteemed scholars at the Society of Biblical Literature, which is the foremost, uh, largest collection of, of scholars, uh, religious study scholars in the world. That’s coming up in November 2025.

John Dickson:
And there’s very little interest in apologetics at that place.

TC Schmidt:
Correct. Yes. So, uh, I wanted to take the argument wherever the data sent me. Um, and this is the, the path I traveled down. Uh, for instance, all we’ve been recently talking about regarding the connections of Josephus, I had no idea when I started writing the book. I actually was done with the book and was writing the conclusion when I started stumbling upon these amazing connections that Josephus has with people who were at the trial of Jesus. And I thought, I, I, I have to write about this. Uh, these haven’t been pointed out before and they need to be.

John Dickson:
Well, your experience of writing the book was also my experience in reading the book. I picked it up as someone who, as I said, for 20 years, has taught. Uh, in secular universities that this passage has been doctored by Christians. There was an original core but has been, uh, tampered with. And, um, I have to rewrite my lecture, I think. Um, and, uh, I’m, I’m incredibly grateful for this. Um. It, it doesn’t read to me at all like apologetics. It, it is very serious work of scholarship and I’m incredibly grateful for your time. And, um, I hope, uh, my skeptical listeners will, you know, ponder this whole thing and what it says, uh, for the study of the person of Jesus. Tom Schmidt, thank you so much for joining us.

TC Schmidt:
Thank you for having me, John.

Undeceptions theme

CREDITS 

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. 

Alasdair Belling is a writer-researcher.

Siobhan McGuiness is our online librarian. 

Lyndie Leviston remains my wonderful assistant. 

Santino Dimarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant. 

Editing by Richard Hamwi.

Our voice actor today was Yannick Lawry.

Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan for making this Undeception possible. 

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com – letting the truth out.