Josephus' Account of Jesus The Testimonium Flavianum Do the Christian gospels record actual events during the First Century A.D./ C.E., or are they the ecstatic visions of a small religious group? There are no surviving Roman records of the First Century that refer to, nor are there any Jewish records that support the accounts in the Christian gospels --- except one. In Rome, in the year 93, Josephus published his lengthy history of the Jews. While discussing the period in which the Jews of Judaea were governed by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, Josephus included the following account:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. - Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3 §63

(Based on the translation of Louis H. Feldman, The Loeb Classical Library.) Yet this account has been embroiled in controversy since the 17th century. It could not have been written by a Jewish man , say the critics, because it sounds too Christian: it even claims that Jesus was the Messiah (ho christos, the Christ)! The critics say: this paragraph is not authentic . It was inserted into Josephus' book by a later Christian copyist, probably in the Third or Fourth Century. The opinion was controversial. A vast literature was produced over the centuries debating the authenticity of the "Testimonium Flavianum", the Testimony of Flavius Josephus. A view that has been prominent among American scholars was summarized in John Meier's 1991 book, A Marginal Jew. This opinion held that the paragraph was formed by a mixture of writers. It parsed the text into two categories: nything that seemed too Christian was added by a later Christian writer, while anything else was originally written by Josephus. By this view, the paragraph was taken as essentially authentic, and so supported the objective historicity of Jesus. Unfortunately, the evidence for this was meager and self-contradictory. But it was an attractive hypothesis.





