Did Josephus really write about Jesus?

Peter Williams interviews Dr Tom C. Schmidt about his new book, 'Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One they Call Christ'. In this episode they tackle the question of whether Josephus's writing about Jesus was edited by Christians to sound more like the biblical account, or whether it could in fact have been written by Josephus. In next week's episode they will discuss whether Josephus could have known people who were present at Jesus's trial.
 
Tom's book has been published online for free: https://academic.oup.com/book/60034
It will also be available in print from 3rd June 2025.

You can find out more on Tom's website at josephusandjesus.com/

Transcript

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Hi, everyone.

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And welcome to Tyndale House’s podcast.

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And we have a really special episode today. My name is Peter Williams, I'm

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the principal at Tyndale House, and I have a special guest,

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Professor and Doctor Thomas C. Schmidt.

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And he's going to be talking about a very remarkable book, that, he is,

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bringing out.

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or just come out and, we're looking forward to conversation together.

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So, and we're going to have, two episodes on this topic.

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So, just to introduce my guest,

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Tom, you've got a new book out

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on Josephus and Jesus,

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which I think is quite

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groundbreaking, and it's making the claim

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that Josephus knew people,

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who were actually at Jesus's trial.

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And that's really stunning.

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And we're going to go into that.

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But, before we go into that,

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why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your academic journey?

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Thank you,

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Peter.

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I guess I could start at the beginning.

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I was raised in a Christian family.

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I didn't become a Christian, though, until my first year in college.

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And there I fell in love with the New Testament.

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I couldn't get enough of it.

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Night after night, page after page.

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I kept reading it, and pretty soon I wanted to

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read it in its original language.

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So I started taking Greek classes.

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I had already signed up for some Latin classes before

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I knew it, I was majoring in Latin and Greek.

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That's what I took my degree in.

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And when I graduated, I married my wife.

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And then I taught Greek and Latin,

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Latin and a little bit of Greek in the public schools

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for a couple of years, did some other things.

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And after a while I found myself in Yale's PhD programme.

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Like you do. Yep.

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Yeah yeah yeah.

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And, and, there, you know, I studied Christian history.

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I did a lot of philological work, studied several languages.

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I was there for about seven years.

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Graduated, ever since I've been a professor at Fairfield University.

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That's a school in southern Connecticut.

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And just last month, I was notified

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I've been awarded tenure there.

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And, so.

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And then, next year, I'll be on leave.

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I'll be a visiting fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison programme,

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where I'll be, I'll be looking at, the history of Christian persecution

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in Persia. P: Wow

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But my interests are, they're all over the place.

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I love Eastern

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Christianity, Christianity in Central Asia, Syriac context, Arabic context.

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But I also love the early church, Christian commentaries, early

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Christian writers.

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But, you know, one of my chief delights is New Testament studies,

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the canonical development of the New Testament and of course,

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the study of the historical Jesus.

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That's what my book is about Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence

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for the One Called Christ.

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And, may I just say, Peter, that throughout my career,

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Tyndale House has been an enormous blessing for me.

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The quality of scholarship coming out of it has been fantastic.

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Truly, Tyndale is worthy of its name.

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So I thank you and so many other people there.

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Well, that's great. And,

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I can brag on your behalf.

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Not only do you read Greek and Latin, but also Hebrew and Syriac and Armenian

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and Coptic and Arabic and some more?

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that's good, that's good.

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Yeah, yeah.

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You're going to be modest about it.

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So let's dive into this book.

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So it's, with Oxford University Press.

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I think I've, you know, heard of them,

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and, to give it the full title, it's Josephus and Jesus:

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New Evidence for the One Called Christ.

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And a lot of it is about,

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a particular mention that Josephus makes of Jesus.

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But first we need to ask ourselves the question, Who is Josephus?

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So maybe you can just give us a little bit of, an idea of,

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who this guy was.

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Yeah.

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He's mostly known by most people as a first-century Jewish historian.

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But his background is a lot,

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it's actually much more complicated.

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He was born in Jerusalem in 37 AD

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He was raised in an eminent priestly family.

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He was also of royal descent.

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He became a Pharisee when he was 19 years old.

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When he was 20 or 25, he became a priest.

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When he was, 30,

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he was appointed one of the top generals in the Jewish army against Rome.

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And then, after the Jewish army's defeat,

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he turned for the last 20, 30 years of his life to writing history.

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And, we know him now as a historian.

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But he was Pharisee, priest, general and historian.

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And, his works are of great significance. It's

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he's probably the most important extrabiblical source on New Testament times.

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And so, you know, you read his works and New Testament

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figures just pour off the pages Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas,

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Herodias, Herod the Great, they're all mentioned by Josephus and discussed.

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So he's he's invaluable for that and invaluable for the study of early Judaism also.

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And just take us really briefly through his, major works or,

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the things that he's known for having written.

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Yeah, he wrote four books, not nearly of equal length.

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He wrote a short autobiography.

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He wrote a short, relatively short apology for for Judaism called Against Appian.

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But his two major works are The Wars of the Jews,

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which talks about the Jewish war with Rome in 66 to 70 AD,

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and then his [Jewish] Antiquities, where he he begins from creation and traces

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Jewish history, all the way up to right before the Jewish war in 66

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AD and, he overlaps, some of these works overlaps.

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He'll talk about the same events several times.

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So he wrote half a million words, almost.

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So, it can be intimidating to dip in, but, if your listeners are interested,

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start with book

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18 of the Antiquities, where he talks about the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

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Read book 5 or 6.

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P: Got it here, book 18, right here. T: Fantastic. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And we're going to have to dive into book 18.

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So just to give it some context, there are 20 books of the Antiquities

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which you see is a particularly, big work.

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And, we got two mentions of Jesus in that.

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And, I'm just going to read, one of them,

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and this is what your passage,

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your book is particularly about,

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where this is what the, the text says,

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And obviously it's in Greek, ‘About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man

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Indeed.

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If indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was one who wrought surprising feats,

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and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.

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He won over many Jews, and many of the Greeks.

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He was the Messiah.

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When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest

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standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified.

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Those who had in the first place

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come to love him, did not give up their affection for him.

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On the third day

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he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied

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these and countless other marvellous things about him, and a tribe of Christians

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so called after him has still to this day not disappeared.’

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Now that's a standard

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translation. You've got your own translation

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that's going to be a little bit different from that at points.

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But as you can see here, we’ve got major Jewish historian

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to our reading today saying he's the Christ.

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And yet we know Josephus doesn't become a Christian.

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Therefore people say, hey, this passage is probably suspect.

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And you have got a claim, basically, that the passage can be understood

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to be entirely from Josephus and

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the second, you know, startlingly claim, that Jesus,

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Josephus had a relationship or knew well, people

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who were actually at Jesus's trial, and we're going to go, in into that,

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particularly, in the second episode, because just just to put that together,

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I mean, this is obviously the main things we have about Jesus trial,

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are the four Gospels and, now along comes,

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Dr Schmidt and is saying that we have, another angle

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in on, that which is, rather remarkable.

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And I'm sure, people will want to contest that claim, but,

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maybe you could just take us through how we should understand this passage.

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Well, what made, brought you to the conclusion that it's authentic.

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Obviously, there's some people deny it's from Josephus.

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The whole lot has been put in.

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Some say he said bits, but not this line or that line; didn't say

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he was a messiah, for instance, or appeared on the third day.

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How how do you come

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to come to that and maybe talk us to how you came to these conclusions?

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Well, I I'll start off by saying that I,

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when I was writing this book, when I first started, I agreed

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with the general scholarly consensus that this passage had been

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contaminated by Christian scribes

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at a later point.

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It's your translation that you read.

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I mean, it sounds way too pro-Christian, radically

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in favour of Jesus to be have written by a non-Christian.

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And that's what I believed.

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But, I started looking at how

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ancient Greek writers treated the passage.

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How did they quote it? How did they comment on it?

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And I started noticing, in case after case after case that

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these ancient and medieval Greek writers were Greek, was their native language.

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They didn't seem to be reading it in the same way

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that modern scholars are reading it.

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They have the same text before them,

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but they don't think of it as this amazingly pro-Christian passage.

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Some of them even seemed to think it was a little negative towards

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Jesus, or could be construed that way.

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So that got my curiosity going, and I decided to do as comprehensive

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a study as I could of the language in the passage

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to see if the language the turns of phrase, the grammar,

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if all that was used by Josephus

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elsewhere, or if it wasn't, if it's a non-Josephan style.

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And I found, using some Greek databases that

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I just Josephus’s style just drips off the pages,

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you know, every turn of phrase, every grammatical construction,

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the word frequency levels, they all are comparable to Josephus.

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You can find just a flood of parallels throughout Josephus’s work.

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So in other words, it looks like this style of Josephus.

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The phrases are used by him elsewhere many times,

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and what's interesting is that if you look at how Josephus uses

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the same words and phrases elsewhere, you see that

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there, these phrases aren't as positive as scholars

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have traditionally considered them to be, and sometimes they're even negative.

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And and that explains why those Greek writers

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were reading the passage differently, because they knew the Greek language.

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They knew these words are a bit more ambiguous.

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So I propose, I think, a more, a more well-calibrated translation

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that considers how Josephus uses these phrases elsewhere, and the passage

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doesn't come across as nearly, positive about Jesus.

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And it actually can be a bit negative about him as well.

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Okay.

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So let's, go into that, one of the things I was fascinated by,

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in your book and, just remind me how many pages your book is in,

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in print.

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Yeah. I think it's 330, I think. Okay.

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So it's a substantial book, is you've got a table of,

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word frequency where obviously there are 89

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words in the standard Greek text of this passage.

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And the rarest word or the word that doesn't

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occur in Josephus elsewhere is the word Christian.

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And then in a sense, you dial up from there to the more frequent words.

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And we'll actually talk about some of these specific words.

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But basically you're finding there's a correlation where,

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the rare words,

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within

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the language more generally, are rarer in Josephus, but the ones that are

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most frequent in the passage also correspond pretty amazingly

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with frequency that he has, within, his own writings.

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And perhaps if we can even name some Greek words, with that, and you could just

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talk us through that so that people can see your argument a bit more depth.

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Yeah.

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One of the criticisms of the passage by previous scholars was that

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there's some words in the passage that are rare in Josephus.

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You know, he has a massive corpus of almost half a million words.

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So we have a great sample size of how Josephus liked to use

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deploy certain vocabulary items.

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And this passage has several words that are rare.

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One word that's even unique.

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He doesn't use it anywhere else.

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And those were previously thought of markers of inauthenticity

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that this is indicators that Christians had interpolated the passage.

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But what I show is when you when you rank all his vocabulary

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and you look at how frequently he will use rare words,

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it turns out that he has this enormous vocabulary.

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I mean, it's just astonishing how large his vocabulary is,

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to the point that he uses a unique word.

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So he deploys a word he doesn't use anywhere else.

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In half a million words, he deploys a unique word about every like

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87 words, and the passage is 89 or 90 words long.

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So you would expect him to use a unique word.

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And that's just what he does is, he does use a word.

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The unique word happens to be the word Christian.

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So what other word would you expect he uses when he's talking about Jesus,

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who is called the Christ?

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And I show that that frequency rate, I show that, it's the same in in a passage.

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In other words,

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that if we took a random passage of 90 words of similar length elsewhere,

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we would find the same amount of rare words, the same number of common words.

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Common words aren't used too frequently, rare words aren't used to infrequently.

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It all matches and the field of forensic authorship

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analysis has been doing this kind of thing for years.

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And, what this shows is that really there's

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there's nothing in terms of the use of vocabulary.

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There's nothing in the passage that is odd.

00:14:54:10 - 00:14:58:01
It all looks Josephan in terms of frequency level.

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Now, your book is available from Oxford University Press.

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Hard copy, but also available electronically.

00:15:06:20 - 00:15:10:03
And is is, how does one get it electronically?

00:15:10:22 - 00:15:13:22
there was, a an anonymous donor

00:15:13:22 - 00:15:16:06
approached me and wanted to make the book available for free.

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So it's it's available for free online at josephusandjesus.com.

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It'll be up there by mid-summer.

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And, you can also buy a hardcover copy.

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It's it's academic pricing, so it'll be quite expensive.

00:15:28:18 - 00:15:33:22
But please avail yourself of the of the free copy at josephusandjesus.com.

00:15:34:03 - 00:15:35:14
Wow, that's really great.

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So people can follow you get down into the detail.

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And then, this other thing about the passage,

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not being as Christian as it sounds to us, so can we go into that?

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Because obviously there is the fact that he,

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Josephus, uses the word

00:15:55:07 - 00:15:59:01
Christ of him and talks about appearances on the third day.

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Maybe you could take us into those and anything else that you think's worthwhile

00:16:03:03 - 00:16:06:03
where people have found it to be,

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a particularly Christian sounding passage.

00:16:09:15 - 00:16:10:07
Yeah. Right.

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So the two major criticisms of that, it doesn't have Josephus’s style.

00:16:13:21 - 00:16:15:07
We've we've talked about that already.

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I don't think that's a valid criticism.

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But the second is that the claims of the passage are just

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don't sound like they come from a non-Christian.

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when you do a close reading of the Greek text, though,

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those those phrases that in your translation sounded like

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they come from a Christian,

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that Jesus appeared alive on the third day, that he works these

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I think your your translation said astounding or amazing things or something like that.

00:16:38:19 - 00:16:41:11
P: Yeah. Marvellous. Yeah, yeah. T: Marvellous.

00:16:41:11 - 00:16:42:12
You see that

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actually, these passages suggest other interpretations.

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That word for for marvelous feats is the Greek word paradoxa.

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And this, Greek has a very rich vocabulary.

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They have many words for miracles and [INSERT GREEK WORD]

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is one

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that's used for like where you've got some kind of questions about that.

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And, and I think the questions are more, you know, moral questions is

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where is this power coming from? It's a little uncertain.

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Josephus uses that same word to describe the miracles

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of Pharaoh's magicians, for instance, and that that that passage

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also has other parallels with the paragraph on Jesus.

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So, that's one example where in English this sounds really positive.

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In Greek, not so much.

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Another example with the resurrection is just a simple grammatical observation.

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That's the Greek word phainomai can mean appear, which is what Josephus uses.

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He appeared to them alive.

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It can also mean ‘seem’, like, he seemed to them

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to be alive, or he appeared to them to be alive.

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In other words, with that understanding, the passage is just saying

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that the disciples thought Jesus was alive on the third day, which,

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is something that non-Christians could freely admit.

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And I showed that that the grammatical structure of that

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sentence is used by Josephus elsewhere.

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And in that same structure he clearly means ‘seem’

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he doesn't mean definitely appeared physically.

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So, and that, I think, is how early Greek writers read the passage,

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because many of them don't seem to think it confesses the resurrection.

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And, there's a number of observations I make that, that

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alter the understanding of the passage.

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So that and I think it calibrates it to Josephus’s,

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style much more closely.

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And the passage then doesn't, doesn't come across as too Christian sounding.

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You mentioned, Christ. Right.

00:18:35:13 - 00:18:37:01
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So so that's another big one where he says, he was the Christ.

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And of course,

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if you're a first century Jew and you say Jesus is the Christ and you're

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also a Christian, you can't really, that's what a Christian is is you confess Jesus

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is the Christ. But,

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that's what the Greek textual witnesses say.

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But there's an early, Latin translation and there's an early Syriac translation.

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There's also an Arabic translation that that's in a third, a second tier witness.

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And these are united.

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The Latin and the Syriac are united.

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And they don't say that, that Jesus is the Christ or was the Christ.

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They say he was thought to be the Christ, or he was believed to be the Christ.

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And these translations are not, copying off of one another.

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They clearly are independently going back to Greek manuscripts.

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So, I think that that is the original reading.

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This also happens to match how Josephus talks about Jesus elsewhere

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in his, one other reference to Jesus, where he says he was called the Christ.

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The Latin and Syriac match that where they say

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he was thought to be, or somehow considered to be the Christ.

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So with that understanding,

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it's again just he's just communicating what people called Jesus.

00:19:49:03 - 00:19:49:19
Yeah.

00:19:49:19 - 00:19:51:23
Well, I mean, that's really remarkable.

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And so,

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what does that make you think then,

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overall about the significance of Josephus,

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his testimony about Jesus,

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as we understand it today?

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I mean, I think, I think it means that

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Josephus talks about Jesus in ways that remarkably parallel

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the synoptic Gospels and the gospel of John.

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He puts Jesus under the reign of Pontius Pilate,

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the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

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He, while Caiaphas was high priest, he says he had many disciples.

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He says that he worked miracles, providing that we understand that word with,

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you know, the appropriate

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suspicion that Josephus accords to it, to moral suspicion.

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But that agrees with the gospel accounts, the Jewish leaders,

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they did think he'd worked miracles.

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They just thought that he was using Beelzebub or something like that.

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He

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affirms that the the apostles, the disciples,

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did believe Jesus was resurrected on the third day, that this wasn't

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something that developed decades or generations later.

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This was a very early Christian belief that Josephus acknowledges.

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And so I think that he provides fantastic light on the on the Jesus of history.

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Now, what will people reply to your book?

00:21:16:08 - 00:21:17:13
Obviously it's it's early days.

00:21:17:13 - 00:21:20:13
You've got some great commendations from serious scholars for your work.

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But, everything is contested.

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So, scholars are going to come, back at you.

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What do you think are the strongest points they could make against your argument?

00:21:34:02 - 00:21:36:10
When I've presented at conferences on this,

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they've brought up the — The thing that gets brought

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and has brought up several times is that, it's not the style of the passage.

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It's not the the content of the passage.

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It's the position of the passage that the passage

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just doesn't fit in the Antiquities where it's located.

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Looks like it's been inserted.

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And I do address that in the book.

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I think it actually fits remarkably well.

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It matches some Jewish traditions.

00:22:01:18 - 00:22:07:02
There's adjacent stories, that that Jewish traditions about Jesus, show

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how the story fits in with, with those two passages and so forth.

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I think that's one thing that that people will, will, will use.

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I think another is that,

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it's going to be hard for people to unlearn how to see a passage

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they're so used to seeing translated in this wildly pro-Christian way.

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And I offer a translation that I think is much fairer to it.

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And I think that that people are going to, they might struggle with that.

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They're also going to struggle with, I've heard this several times also that

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people will say, he should have said more about Jesus.

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He should have said more. Why did he only say 90 words?

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He should have had pages and pages about Jesus.

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To which, you know, I would say, you know, it sounds like you're talking

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like a 21st century person who's more interested in Jesus than Josephus was.

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You know, he he would have had ample reason to to say what he did.

00:23:03:12 - 00:23:06:07
You know, he's writing at a time when the Jewish people are divided

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about Jesus, you know, that there's a lot of uncertainty about who he is.

00:23:09:15 - 00:23:13:01
So he would have had many reasons to not try and stir up a hornet's nest

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or to say something briefly.

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Christianity was controversial to the Graeco-Romans as well.

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And they’re part of his audience.

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So, there's many reasons why he may not have

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wanted to dwell overmuch on on

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Jesus.

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Yeah. That's great.

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Well, in the next episode, we will go a little bit more into the chronology,

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particularly of, of Josephus, and his relationship with Jesus.

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I think we're going to,

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of course, see the,

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Josephus is born,

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after, the time of the events of Jesus ministry.

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So that's something we just need to make clear.

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So he's close from one perspective.

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But, he's not an eyewitness himself but we're going to see

00:23:54:12 - 00:23:57:12
in the next episode that he knew people who did,

00:23:58:07 - 00:23:59:06
meet Jesus.

00:23:59:06 - 00:24:03:05
So very, very grateful to, Tom Schmidt for making his time available.

00:24:04:03 - 00:24:07:09
I encourage you to go to his website.

00:24:07:09 - 00:24:10:18
And, maybe you could just give us the URL for that.

00:24:11:00 - 00:24:15:17
P: As we end and to see that T: yes, it's josephusandjesus.com

00:24:16:01 - 00:24:20:21
josephusandjesus.com and there you can see more of that book.

00:24:20:21 - 00:24:24:02
And of course, you should, follow our own,

00:24:24:14 - 00:24:28:17
Tyndale House podcast, rate review and, share widely.

00:24:28:17 - 00:24:32:05
And this particular story is really worth sharing widely.

00:24:32:05 - 00:24:34:22
So thank you very much, Tom, and looking forward to the next episode.