The Sean McDowell Show - Breaking: The Earliest Non-Christian Testimony to Jesus may be Authentic (Josephus)

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Could a first-century Jewish historian offer one of the most compelling extra-biblical confirmations of Jesus’ life? In this episode, Dr. Thomas Schmidt, a Yale Ph.D. and author of Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, is here to explore the controversial Testimonium Flavianum, a passage in Josephus’ Antiquities that remarkably affirms key Christian beliefs: Jesus’ miracles, His messianic role, and even His resurrection. Dr. Schmidt challenges the traditional narrative about the passage being interpolated. READ: Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christby T. C. Schmidt (https://a.co/d/dG4jLCW) Download book FREE: https://josephusandjesus.com/ Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org  Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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download it today. Flavius Josephus wrote the first non-Christian reference to historical Jesus. The passage in his antiquities affirms striking Christian beliefs about Jesus, including his messianic status, miracle working, fulfillment of prophecy and resurrection. Scholars have typically concluded that a later Christian scribe interpolated this passage in part. Surprisingly, a new book with Oxford University Press suggests that the passage by Josephus is essentially authentic. Here discuss it is Thomas Schmidt, a graduate of Yale University, earning his PhD there, and the author of the groundbreaking book Josephus and Jesus, new evidence for the one called Christ. I have been eagerly anticipating this conversation. Thanks for coming on.

Sean, thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here. Well, let's jump right in for some of our listeners. I know many will be familiar with Josephus, but maybe just paint you. the picture, who was he and why is he so important for historical Jesus studies? Many people think of him as a Jewish historian, and he was, but before he became a historian, he lived this fascinating life. He was born in 37 AD in Jerusalem, so just seven, five years after the crucifixion of Jesus. He was born into an eminent priestly family, a family descended from high priests, also descended from royalty. So he was a very high-ranking aristocrat. When he was 19, he became a Pharisee. When he was 20, he became a priest. When he was 25, he was an ambassador

where he met with the Empress of Rome. When he was 30, he became a general. I mean, this guy did everything. And then after the Jewish war, which was about 70 AD, he devoted the next 20 years of his life to writing the history of the Jewish people. So he tells us an enormous, amount about the New Testament, about New Testament events and people, and helps us to contextualize so much of what the Gospels in the Book of Acts tell us. All right. So maybe tell us your personal story before we get into your thesis. And by the way, I want folks to know we're going to talk about where a link is to your book.

Because of a generous donor, even though it's with Oxford Press, people can get it for free, which is incredible. But first tell us, why are you so interested in Joseph? and what motivated you to write a 300-page-plus academic book on him and Jesus? Who isn't interested in Josephus? You read his works, and he tells us the names and the happenings of so many people in the New Testament. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, Anas, the high priest, the head of the Sanhedron. He talks about Herodias, the girl who danced for the head of John the Baptist.

He talks about these people. He talks about John the Baptist. So I've always been fascinated by Josephus. And of course, he also talks about Jesus. And if what he says is authentic, it would be the earliest non-Christian reference to Jesus, which would make it of enormous interest in value. So when I was a PhD student at Yale, I was in a PhD seminar on the historical Jesus. I had to write a paper.

So I wrote a paper on this particular paragraph that Josephus wrote about Jesus. And at the time, I went with the standard view that this paragraph had somehow been altered by Christian scribes. It just looks far too positive about Jesus. He says things about Jesus that no one could ever say without actually being a Christian, but he's not a Christian. So that's what I thought too. But I wrote that paper and some things didn't really sit right with me. I felt like I was coming across some evidence suggesting otherwise. And so after I wrote that paper, I decided to try and revamp it and publish it as an article.

And it ended up being 75 pages. It was way too long to be an article. So then it became a book. And 10 years later, it's now published. That's what got me interested in it. What kept me going in the project was I kept coming across all of these examples, all these lines of evidence that were suggesting to me that those passages that have traditionally been interpreted by scholars as being so fantastically pro-Jesus and hence suspicious, actually

in the context of Josephus' work are perhaps not nearly as positive and sound much more like what a first-century non-Christian Jew like Josephus would have said. Okay, so maybe get us to the root of the controversy. of Riecy surrounding Jesus? Like, what are some of the different perspectives and maybe the majority perspective that many scholars take on the passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum? Sean, you said it well in the beginning. You pointed out these incredibly pro-Christian things.

Jesus is said to have been the Christ. He was resurrected, fulfills Jewish prophecy. Those are the primary passages that scholars point to to say that this doesn't look like this could come from Joseph. In other words, the claims of the passage don't sound like something Josephus or anyone like him would have ever said. And then secondly, the other major argument against authenticity is that the style of the passage, like the wording, the grammar, doesn't look like the way Josephus uses words and phrases. We have almost half a million words of what Josephus wrote. So we have a really big sample size to draw from, and scholars have traditionally pointed at some phrases and said, this isn't something Josephus uses.

So you combine those two reasons. It doesn't sound like the claims of Josephus, and it doesn't look like he's writing. And the consensus among scholars is that the passage has been doctored by Christians. It's been tampered and interpolated with by some Christian scribe way back in antiquity. And those changes percolated down through the manuscript. tradition and contaminated all the manuscripts that we have left today. That's the consensus view, and that's the view I believed initially also, because on the face of it, it sounds really plausible. So it sounds like the consensus view is Josephus wrote a truncated version of this passage,

lacking some of the more distinctly Christian elements. And the reason is internally, it's not written in a style that seems to match Josephus. You have a Jewish writer attesting things that a Jewish writer would not say. But there's also some external evidence outside of the text itself that people cite. For example, like the 10th century Arabic text that's found. And we'll get into some of those particulars. But it's kind of a combination of both internal and external evidence for why people reject this passage, isn't it?

Correct, yeah. And there are scholars that will say if Josephus had written this passage like what we have today, it's so fantastically pro-Christian. Why aren't more Christian, ancient Christian writers quoting from it? You'd think that they would love this, but they don't quote from it. Therefore, the passage probably wasn't in the original version of Josephus's antiquities that he wrote. It was inserted or altered at a later point. Well, I intentionally in the introduction called this game-changing because if you're right, this is a significant shift in historical Jesus scholarship. I have heard the standard position. Most apologists and New Testament scholars that I follow adopted, it has made sense to me. It really was reading your book that made me pause and rethink and ask the question if even I've gotten this one wrong and need to pivot in this direction. So we're going to get into some of these particulars, but maybe. maybe just kind of paint the picture for us what your unique proposal is and is it unique to you or of other scholars made this argument before, but the attention just hasn't been placed on it. My argument is unique, but it follows a trajectory of scholarship. A hundred years ago, scholars were fairly united that the passage was a wholesale forgery. Josephus never said anything like this. It was inserted by later Christians.

and there was a very famous scholar named Henry Thackeray, and he translated the works of Josephus. He agreed that it was a forgery. But after he was done working on the text of Josephus, he changed his mind because he realized that there were so many stylistic parallels between the passage about Jesus and the rest of the works of Josephus, so much so that it seemed impossible for a scribe to have manufactured these things. it looks like at least most of the passage came from Josephus. And that trajectory, that changed scholarship. So scholars started thinking, okay, Josephus wrote something like the passage.

He just didn't say some of those fantastic details. And that's where scholarship has stood. There's been a few scholars that have argued for even more authenticity as a French scholar and some others who've argued for that. What I do is I leverage. new databases of Josephus' works where I can search systematically the Greek text, half a million words. This is something humans can't do without a database. We can't keep half a million words in our minds, but databases can. So I leverage those and I find a host, a flood of all sorts

of other stylistic parallels. In every single phrase, it looks like this comes, it sounds like Josephus. So that's number one. So that argument that I mentioned earlier about how the style doesn't look like it was made by Josephus is false. It actually looks extraordinarily like Josephus. But secondly, when you compare how Josephus uses the same words and phrases elsewhere, that's where something fascinating develops. You realize that those passages that have traditionally been interpreted as fantastically pro-Christian aren't. They look much more ambiguous, sometimes even negative. They don't look like these confessions of faith. They look like either a neutral, ambiguous, or potentially even negative statement about Jesus. And you add that up,

and there goes the second critique. The second critique is that regardless of the style of the passage, the content is not something Josephus would say. But these parents, parallels reveal that when in context and properly understood, those passages actually sound exactly like something a first century Jewish writer would have said about Jesus. That's such a novel, fascinating claim. Now, in your book, you have a full chapter where you take the passage by Josephus and you go line by line and give your assessment of it. In a little bit, we won't pull all of that out. People can get your book again for free, which is awesome. but we'll do about four or five of those.

But that's the one that gave me pause. I was like, wait a minute, this sounds so obviously anti-Christian, but you made me rethink it in a way I did not expect. So we'll come to that. Before doing so, there's different ways of assessing the reliability of an ancient writing or an inscription. One way, of course, is internally to look at it. Another way is to assess the textual tradition of various manuscripts.

What are the earliest manuscripts of the Testimonium Flavianum? What do they reveal about its authenticity and how we should best translate? In other words, kind of in sum, Tom, how does the textual tradition help advance your case? The manuscripts of Josephus are often brought up, and people will sometimes say that the manuscripts are late. The earliest manuscripts of Josephus's antiquities come from the 10th, or 11th century. So this is about 900 or even a thousand years after he wrote, which is a very long period of time. There's several things to keep in mind about this. Number one, that's totally normal. That is a normal textual situation regarding ancient authors. Very normal, nothing puzzling

about that. But secondly, the actual textual witness situation is much better than it seems. And that's because in addition to these manuscripts of the antiquities from the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, we also have ancient translations that were made of Josephus' work in antiquity. And we have one from a Latin one. We have a Syriac one. We also have a secondary Arabic and Armenian translations. The Latin is the only one that's a complete translation of the antiquities, but the Syriac was of the actual paragraph that was made by Josephus regarding Jesus. So we've got these other lines of evidence. The earliest Latin translation, there are actually several, and the earliest Latin translation comes from 393 AD by Jerome. He's the individual who translated the Bible into

Latin. He's one of the best translators in the history of the ancient world. And he translates the passage. So we have those. But we also... have quotations, just like today in the antiquity, authors would quote other authors. And when scholars are assembling an ancient text, sometimes there'll be very long, important quotations of a text found in a different author. In the case of Josephus, the paragraph about Jesus is quoted almost 20 times in ancient and medieval Greek writers. And the first quotas, the first quotas, the paragraph about Jesus is quoted almost 20 times in ancient and medieval Greek writers. And the first quotation comes from 313 AD by Eusebius of Caesarea. And then the earliest manuscript of Eusebius' quotation comes from 411 AD.

And that manuscript is actually the earliest precisely dated manuscript of a published work in the world. And by precisely dated, I mean that usually when scholars are dating manuscripts, they have to go by handwriting analysis, paleographical analysis, to just get a rough estimate within the century of when a document was written, a manuscript was written. Later on, scribes realized, even ancient scribes realized this was a problem. So they would start dating, they'd leave a date when they were done copying the manuscript. They'd say, I finished writing this on such and such a date. The earliest instance of that occurring is in 411 AD in this one particular manuscript,

and the manuscript happens to contain a quotation of the testimony in Flavianum. So to put it another way, in some ways we have some of the best manuscript attestation to this passage of any text. We have remarkable manuscript attestation from multiple lines of evidence, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Arabic, but we also have very early quotations as well. So all of that helps to contextualize the passage. You can see that starting from the earliest quotation in 313, the passage hasn't really been tampered with. So you have a thousand years from 313 up to the antiquities manuscripts in 1,400, 1400, where there was no tampering.

So then when we have that two or 300 year gap between when Josephus wrote in 94 to when we have the first quotation, there's a 200-year-year gap. And there's a 200-year gap, but we already have a thousand years where we know there wasn't much tampering going on. So it suggests that there probably wasn't tampering over that earlier 200-year period. Okay, that makes total sense. So the physical manuscripts, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, Josephus, standard, nothing surprising about that of a lot of ancient writings that are generally trusted. but we can move even closer than that because of quotations of that passage in Eusebius, translations

by Jerome. And going back, you know, Eusebius writes this to say the fourth century. We have a copy early fifth century. There's minimal change over that time. So that at least suggests the burden of proof is on those who say, no, it was changed earlier. Show us why we should believe that. Since when we can track it, we have stability of text.

Is that a fair summary? Oh, yeah, precisely. Okay. All right. So maybe I should have said this at the beginning, but do you have in front of you your best translation of the text of Josephus that you could read to us? And we haven't, I know you're pulling up right now, so I'll give you just a minute to do so. But we haven't fully justified or made your case yet that this is the authentic one. So we'll come back to that.

But I love it if you just read that passage for us, obviously in English, of what you think is most likely what Josephus said. I'd be happy to. I will say, though, that it's always impossible to have a perfect translation of another language. So there's some nuances here that I would want to play with a little bit, and I might pause just to signify those times. But here's how the passage goes. And just so you know, I would expect nothing less from a scholar. So please nuance for us. And those scholars watching going, wait a minute, hold on, what about this?

You actually have pictures of many of the early manuscripts in the back of the book. Again, we'll give a link at the end, which is free. But for now, give us the best summary with the nuances that you think are necessary. So this translation, I think, is much fairer to what Josephus said and what he meant. but there are some further nuances I would give. So it would go like this. 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. You could also translate that strange deeds or magical deeds, a teacher of men who received truisms with pleasure. And he brought over, you could also say he induced, many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. he was believed to be the Christ, and when Pilate had condemned him to the cross of 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 he appeared to them to be alive again, the divine prophets having 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. Right away,

are hearing this going, okay, wait a minute, if one ought to call him a man, he was a doer of miraculous or strange or magical deeds, he was the Christ, he appeared to them alive. Now, hold your horses, people watching this going, wait a minute, how could a Jewish writer at that time say this? We'll come back and take a few of these particular lines and show why you think they're not, they don't necessarily mean on the surface how we would take them and how the majority of scholars have taken them. But how, let me ask a few more questions before we get there. You hinted at this earlier.

We kind of talked about the textual tradition. But what about how early church fathers quoted and translated the testimony of Flavianum? What does that reveal? And of course, if it's authentic, the objection I typically heard, and I've stated myself, is why don't more early church fathers quote it positively if your translation understanding is correct? This is another, I think, evidence in favor of my argument.

And that's because when you do an exhaustive search of every single time an ancient or medieval Greek author quotes from this passage, from the Testimonium Flavianumas scholars call it. You quickly realize that they don't seem to be interpreting it the same way modern scholars have been. They don't seem to be finding the same fantastic details, even though they apparently just quoted. them. So they'll quote the passage and instead of pointing out that Jesus was resurrected, he fulfilled prophecy, he's the Christ, they'll instead focus on the chronology. He reigned under, he ministered under Pontius Pilate. Culpability of the Jewish leaders in his death, because Joseph says there's the first man among us who accused Jesus. They'll focus on the number of Jesus' disciples. They'll focus on the nature of Jesus' teaching, none of which are the things you would

expect them to focus on if the passage was actually stating what scholars have traditionally interpreted it to be. And there are a minority, a small minority, that do notice these things, but the majority don't. In fact, some of them are even worried that the passage will be interpreted negatively. They're worried that that word for miracles that I translated as either incredible deeds or strange deeds or magical deeds is a negative term in Josephus that pertains to sorcery or wizardry or something like that. There's another source who is concerned. He quotes the passage and then he says either Jesus was the Messiah or he was a charlatan. And it's such a strange way to take the passage. If the passage is so authentic, why would you posit that one possible way to interpret it is that he was a charlatan?

It just doesn't make sense. And so I think the reception history also aligns with the idea that scholars have not been interpreting the passage the way Josephus meant it or the way early Christians interpreted it. That's so fascinating and provocative. Now, you hinted at this a little bit earlier, but maybe you could kind of give us a little bit more detail about this, about your internal analysis of the words in this passage in comparison with the rest of Josephus. I have often heard that the words don't really match up,

and I have not done a word study, taken the scholarly assessment of this. But I also be curious, what tools did you use? Did you use artificial intelligence to uncover this or just kind of a larger database? So tell us what tools you use, how you did it, and what you found. AI wasn't available when I was doing this. So this is pre-AI, but I did use Greek databases. There's two different databases out there that I used. One is the Thesaurus Linguay-Grikiy database.

The other is the Accordance Greek database of Josephus. I used both of them for different purposes. They were both good at different things. and I tried to follow the outlines of the field of forensic authorship analysis. This is a field of scientific inquiry where people for criminal cases or civil cases will try to prove or disprove that someone wrote a document. And they have high standards about how you're supposed to do this. But the fundamental assumption is that we all have our own way of using language.

We all say things in unique ways. And then if you have a large enough sample size, you can, figure out someone's pattern, and then you'll be able to take a smaller document to verify if that person was behind it. That's the theory. So that's what I tried to do with Josephus. And I did it in broadly two ways. One way is you simply, it's a brute force method where you just literally look for parallels between the words and phrases in the passage at hand compared to the rest of the works of Josephus. And that's valuable because it can show. show you that this a given phrase somewhere that scholars have said he never uses anywhere else,

he actually does use elsewhere. And they missed it because of course 40 years ago databases weren't available. You had to do this all manually. And it's impossible to do a good job manually. You need a database to be able to do that. That was one way I did it. The second way is I use something called word frequency rates where I looked at the almost half million, words that Josephus wrote. And I looked at the rates in which he uses his most common words and the rate in which he uses his most uncommon words to get a sense of how often does he use the most frequent words and how often does he deploy the most uncommon words to get a register of this and then compare that to the testimony in Flavian. Look at the paragraph and say,

are there the number of common words we would expect in a passage of this length? Are there the number of rare words we would expect in a passage of this length? And I looked at the, you know, the first most common, second most common, third most common, all down the top 10 most common, and the top 10 least common. And they all match up. It all looks like Josephus. It has the same frequency rates. And one of these pointed, I think, to a significant discovery.

One of the gotchas, the great critiques of the passage is that in the passage, Josephus uses a word that he never uses anywhere else. And that was said to be a marker of forgery because you're talking about an individual who wrote half a million words. It seems unimaginable that he would randomly use a unique word in this passage. What I show, though, in my vocabulary analysis of Josephus, is that he uses unique words. words all the time. He had this ridiculous vocabulary. He in fact uses unique words of like 5,500 times. Oh my goodness. Yes. And what that means if you run the numbers, it means that he uses a unique word once every 87 words. And the passage is 90 words long. So actually the fact that there's one unique word is evidence in favor of him as the author because you would expect him to use a word

in a 90 word paragraph, a unique word in a 90 word paragraph. Okay, so bottom line, we're testing the authenticity of this passage in terms of the traditional and earliest translation. When we look textually, we have an early textual tradition of it compared to other ancient writings. It stays the same for that period. And then internally when we look at it, the writing and the style and even the frequency of unique words match up. So really in your assessment, there is nothing unique about this passage at all that suggests somebody else wrote it besides Josephus.

Is that fair? That's fair with, I would say, one qualification. Okay. And the qualification is that sentence that is often translated to. he was the Christ. That's the sentence you find in the Greek manuscripts. I do think something has dropped out from that phrase. However, if you look at the ancient Latin translation by Jerome, and you look at the ancient Syriac translation, they both have something different there. They both say he was thought to be the Christ or he was believed to be the Christ. And these translators

are not copying off of one another. Syriac is this far eastern language. It's not anywhere near Latin culture. So they wouldn't have been copying off of one another. They must have been using early Greek manuscripts of Josephus' work that instead there, instead of saying Jesus was the Christ, they said he was only somehow considered to be the Christ. So I think that's the one change to the Greek text that I think has happened.

having said that though, I don't necessarily think this was a scribe intentionally changing things. And I think it was an accidental change. At least you can argue for that. And that's because if your listeners think about it, do Christians, well, do they go around saying Jesus was the Christ? Or do they say he is the Christ? And the phrases in the past tense, which is weird. Christians say he is the Christ because they believe he's still alive today. He's not dead.

He's not in the past. And so this tells me that something has dropped out. It's not that the whole phrase was inserted by a scribe. Something was dropped out, probably unintentionally or at least plausibly unintentionally, because if a scribe was intentionally changing things, you'd think they would have changed it to present tense. He is the Christ. And the Latin and the Syriac show that if you just omit the word,

word was or thought to be, then it all makes sense. It just says was the Christ. So I think that dropped out. Other than that, though, I think the whole thing is authentic. So in a minute, we're going to get to about four or five of these lines in the passage you read and get your take on them, which is some of the most interesting part of your book. But I'm really curious your mindset going into this. So I did my doctoral work on the death of the apostles. And when I did, started, I was trying to advance the case that they died as martyrs and this is a piece of evidence for the resurrection. But very, very quickly, as I probed into, I thought, what am I doing? This is not the way scholarship can and should be done. I've got to assess on its own merits first. Did they

believe Jesus was ridden for the grave? Did they claim to be witnesses? What evidence do we have that they actually died as martyrs? And if that is the case, can this argument still go forward? in a way that is fair and judicious. What was your mindset going into this? Was it I just got to figure this out? Or was it I've got this unique take on Josephus? And as a scholar, if I could advance this unique case, this could stir certain things up.

I thought that the passage had been tampered with. And my motivation into looking at it was I was very interested in the Arabic and Syriac translations of the passage. because those don't sound as pro-Christian, especially the Arabic. Some scholars have thought that the Arabic translator was using an uncorrupted version of the testimony in Flavianum. And I study Eastern Christianity. I do historical Jesus New Testament studies, but I also do Eastern Christianity.

So I'm familiar with Arabic and Syriac. That was my motive. I thought the Greek text has been contaminated. Perhaps the Arabic and Syriac are more authentic. I'd love to just explore this and perhaps be able to peel away some of those layers of redaction or contamination that have gone on in the Greek passage. That was my hope. My secondary hope was just to do a fun exploration of the Arabic reception of Josephus, but that's not the path I went down. I started realizing that the Greek itself can be interpreted the same way that the Arabic is interpreting it by and large.

that already you can tone down or you even should tone down those fantastically pro-Christian things, especially when you realize how Josephus uses words and phrases elsewhere. Okay, that's helpful. So you've mentioned from the beginning these seemingly pro-Christian statements that many scholars have taken as being interpolated by a later Christian because a non-Messianic Jews such as Josephus would not make these. statements. You offer a unique understanding of them. Now again, in your book, which again, people can get for free, which is amazing because of a donor, you walk through all the lines. I'm just going to take, let's take maybe five of them that I think are most central and kind of

most important and reframe how you see this. So there's the line refers to Jesus as a wise man and then says if indeed one ought to call him a man. Now that would give most scholars pause because it's like, oh, this is a suggestion that he's more than a man. That must have been interpolated by a Christian, but you see it differently. I do. Not originally, though. Originally, I saw it the same way you describe, but when you look in context, just on the face of it, he says, if indeed one ought to call him a man, and the question becomes, what does he mean? Does he mean Jesus is more than human? Or is this like an insult?

Is he saying he's less than human somehow? What's going on here? And I think what reveals what's going on is the very next phrase, where he says, for, he's explaining why he said, if indeed one ought to call him a man. And he says, for he was a doer of, and here's the key phrase, some people translate the Greek term as miracles for he was a doer of miracles, but you can actually translate it as he was a doer of sorcery or magical deeds.

And all of a sudden, from a Jewish perspective, sorcery, of course, is wicked in Judeo-Christian tradition. So if this is how we're supposed to understand it, that if it's right to call him a man for he was a doer of sorceress things, all of a sudden, that does not become a positive statement. it becomes a negative statement. And the question is, what did Josephus mean by that word? The word for miracles or sorcery or magical deeds is paradoxa. Already you can tell there's a little bit of an edge to that word. That's where we get our word for paradox from.

And in Josephus, this word is the same word he uses to describe the miraculous deeds wrought by the magicians of Pharaoh in their kind of duel with Moses. He calls them, they worked a paradoxa. And it's the same term. There's this ancient source called the Jew of Selsus. He's this vicious anti-Christian writer who's trying to attack Jesus and early Christians. He's writing around the year 150. Like Josephus, he's Jewish.

And he accuses Jesus of performing paradoxa through magic. And he views this as an accusation against Jesus. So my argument is that that word that Jesus performed miracles is not a positive word. It's ambiguous, it's perhaps negative, and that forces us to reinterpret the clause that it's explaining. If indeed we ought to call him a man for he was a doer of paradoxa, all of a sudden, you got to ask yourself, what is he saying here? Is he critiquing Jesus' morality here? He's saying that he was kind of a scumbag. is he unsure?

Does he just not really know? He's not sure where to place Jesus? Either of those interpretations, of course, sound much more plausible coming from Josephus than the alternative interpretations. And this is how early Christians, I think, read the passage.

Some of them are disturbed by this statement. They're worried people are going to interpret what Josephus says here as something negative, and they want to kind of defend Jesus after they quote this passage. That's so interesting because Josephus was so widely read, so widely known so early. The argument has often been, well, why didn't they cite him more if he's calling him, you know, one, maybe one ought to call him a man because he did miraculous deeds. You're saying, no, they actually didn't cite him a ton because this didn't help.

And when they did cite him, they were concerned and cautious because this is. is just as plausibly, if not more plausibly, suggesting that he's kind of working sorcery and is someone we should be concerned about. So they want to make sure that other people who are aware of this are not taken in with this false view of Jesus. Is that fair? Absolutely.

I can give one example of this. Yeah, do it, please. There's an author, very famous theologian named Origin of Alexandria. And he quotes from Josephus many times, and scholars have often said, why doesn't Origin quote this passage? He knows Josephus. Why isn't he quoting from him?

It turns out that in the book where he quotes from Josephus, he's writing against that source I mentioned, the Jew of Selsus. He's trying to rebut this anti-Christian criticism. And the anti-Christian criticism is that Jesus performed paradoxa by magic. So why would Origin ever quote Josephus

affirming that Jesus did perform paradoxa. It would make no sense for origin to give that kind of ammunition to his opponent. So that argument from silence, sometimes arguments from silence are powerful, but sometimes they're very weak. And it all depends on whether we actually should expect someone to bring something up or notice something. And in this case, I do not think we would have any reason for origin to bring this passage up. I agree with you. The way I phrased it is there certain arguments of silence, but then there's some that have some teeth that we would suspect to find. So I made that case with the apostles that if any had recanted their faith or walked away, we'd have reason to think a Christian or a foe would include this. So the lack of it is suggestive.

You're making the same kind of argument here. Let's look at three more lines than you can tell us how you take them. So there's also a line in this passage that says, and he brought over many of the Jews and many also of the Greeks. How do you take that? That's another weird one because the gospel testimony is that Jesus had Jewish disciples. He didn't have lots of Greek disciples. And you can find some illusions. There's some hangers on. There's some Gentiles that follow him. But by and large, Jesus is very explicit. I came for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. And he tells the disciples go only amongst the 12 tribes of Israel. And so this seems weird coming from a Christian. It also seems weird because, or odd, because that word he brought over or he led, if you look

that word up in a Greek dictionary, you'll also notice one of the definitions of that word is to induce, to mislead someone astray. Now, the word doesn't necessarily mean that. You can just interpret it neutrally. But there is some negative connotations here. In other words, it just doesn't look like anything a Christian would have said. It also, if there was a Christian scribe who wanted to alter this paragraph, why would they leave something like this behind? Why would they leave paradoxa behind as well? Those would be prime candidates for doctoring, for putting a more positive word for miracles. Greek has many words for miracles. Use a more positive one. Greek has many words for leading. Let's use a more positive one. But they didn't. And that suggests that they weren't in the

habit. Christian scribes were not in the habit of altering this passage. That is so, so interesting. The kind of thing the English cannot bring forth, but only a careful analysis of the Greek. Let's look at two more. Now, you already mentioned this passage, he was the Christ. And you said, if it was a Christian, it more like would be he is the Christ. And then later writings, I don't recall if he said Jerome and maybe Eusebius kind of qualified. It was believed or thought he was the Christ. What's your take on that passage? It's Jerome.

Jerome in 393, in his Latin translation, he says he was believed to be the Christ. And then Jacob of Odessa, around 700 AD, in his Syriac translation, he says something almost synonymous. He says it was thought that he was the Christ. And Jacob is one of the most educated people in the entire world. He's a renowned translator. So here we have two famous accomplished translators, Jerome in Latin, Jacob and Syriac. They're both effectively translating that particular sentence the same way. So I think that clearly is the authentic reading. It also, so your viewers know, Josephus mentions Jesus one other time in a very brief passage where he talks about James the brother, in his words, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ. And there he uses the word

Christ again, but instead of saying Jesus was the Christ, he says he was called the Christ. So this Latin and Syriac translation of the testimony in Flavianum, it parallels what Josephus says about Jesus elsewhere. So we have three different lines of evidence suggesting that in this particular sentence, Josephus said Jesus was only somehow considered to be the Christ, not that he was the Christ. Of course, that comes just two books later in book 20, that reference, which is interesting that it comes after it, even though in close to that is John the Baptist rather than come before. and you draw that point out. But you have an appendix on that passage.

And that's a key passage for me on the death of the apostles. So when I got to the end with a little fear and trembling, I was like, I wonder what his conclusion is going to be. I was glad to see that you concluded that it's also largely an authentic tradition that's passed on. But it helps us with this earlier book as well. One more line from this that I think would be helpful to get your assessment on is it said, it says, for he appeared to them alive. How could any Jewish writer possibly say that and

seem to affirm the resurrection? I agree. It's very suspicious as it's currently translated because it looks like Josephus is confessing the resurrection of Jesus, which is just not something someone can really do and deny that Jesus was the Christ or not become a Christian themselves. but if you read the original Greek, the word that Josephus uses is very interesting. It's not the word that Christians used to describe the resurrection. It's a different word that's very unusual for Christians to use. And this word can mean that Jesus appeared to them alive, or it can just as easily mean he seemed to them to be alive.

In other words, in that second interpretation, Josephus is not confessing the resurrection. He's just relating a report about what the disciples thought. And that, I think, when you look at how Josephus uses that vocabulary item elsewhere in his massive works, that seems to be how he uses that word. There's actually a very precise parallel where he uses the same word in the same exact grammatical context, where he clearly means he seemed not he was. And it's that passage.

Joseph is talking about that terrible story where Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, and then the brothers bring Joseph's bloodied cloak to Jacob, their father to say that Joseph was killed by beasts, even though he wasn't. And Josephus is talking about that story. And to summarize it, he says that the brothers showed him the cloak, so that, quote, it would seem to Jacob that he was killed by beasts.

And it's, even though we know he wasn't, he was alive and well and been sold off into slavery. Josephus uses that same word and grammatical construction to describe the resurrection of Jesus, which means he had to have meant that not that Jesus was resurrected, but that it seemed to the disciples that he was resurrected. And that takes care of the suspicious nature of the passage. That's so interesting. And there's other seemingly suspicious lines in there. But again, people can check it out in your book assess it themselves with a comparison. But you've argued so far that we have a reliable translation of Josephus. There's a consistent textual tradition of it. Internally, it matches within the other words and writings and style we have of Josephus. But some people might say, okay, Josephus still wrote in 93, 94. That's 60 years. plus after the time of Jesus, where did Josephus get his information? Even if this is translated accurately, why should we trust this?

Is he just passing on something that he heard? Or did he possibly have some kind of direct or indirect access to stories and information about Jesus? I had that same question in my mind. I was writing the conclusion of my book, and I thought I'd do a few paragraphs on where Josephus got his information about Jesus, because is he using a Christian source? Is he basing this on rumor or report? What's going on here? And that's when I realized I'd never thought about it before,

but Josephus was intimately connected with early 30s and 40s Jewish leaders. Jewish leaders in Jerusalem who were operating in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, people who would have seen Jesus. So, for example, Josephus knows several high priests, He knows the head of the Sanhedron. He knows members of the Herodian dynasty. He was stationed in Galilee for three years, where he went to Copernum. He went to Cana.

He went to Magdalas. He went to Tiberius. He lived three miles down the road from Nazareth. He's walking in the places Jesus walked. He's growing up in Jerusalem in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. His father was 25 years old when Jesus was crucified. And his father lived in Jerusalem. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem.

His father was there in the city when that happened. So he is remarkably well placed to know people who knew Jesus. He's remarkably well placed to even know Jesus' enemies. And in my book, I argue that I think he actually did know some of Jesus' enemies directly. And this isn't simple hypothesis or speculation. I think there's actually very good evidence that he did. And there's several lines of evidence here, but to simplify things, in the passage about Jesus, he talks about the trial. And he says it was the first men who accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate.

And that phrase, Josephus loves that phrase. He uses it a lot. He also uses that phrase in 51 or 52. AD when he's talking about his own life. And in 51 or 52 AD, Josephus says, I began continually meeting with the first men of Jerusalem. And then he continues saying several times over the next 20 years, I knew the first men. I knew the first men. So he says it was the first men who accused Jesus. And then later, 20 years later, he says, I knew the first man. This obviously brings up the possibility that some of these first men were probably still alive. We know from Josephus' background.

He's a high-ranking aristocrat. He knows high priest. Of course, he could have known some of these people. And in the book, I tried to go one step further. I try to identify if we can actually name some people that Josephus knew who also either were at the trial of Jesus or easily could have been at the trial of Jesus. And the most likely candidate, I give several there, I give 10 or 11 of these candidates by name, but the most likely candidate is Josephus's commander in the Jewish war. So Josephus knew this guy face to face. He was a former high priest. His name was Anonis. He was a former high priest. He was the most powerful man in Jerusalem at the time around 67, 68 AD. And Josephus tells us and the Gospels tell us that this man's father was the high priest, Anis,

who is the high priest in charge of the trial of Jesus in the gospel of John. We also know that this man's brother-in-law was Caiaphas, who was also in charge of the trial of Jesus in all four Gospels. So Josephus knows the brother-in-law and son of the two individuals who brought accusations against Jesus. This is already an extremely close relationship. It already suggests that Josephus isn't relying on hearsay. He's not relying on rumor or report.

I mean, he knows people who would have been intimately familiar with the Jesus movement. The question becomes, would Josephus' commander, yes, his father was part of the trial of Jesus, yes, his brother-in-law was involved in the trial of Jesus, but was Joseph's commander, himself at the trial of Jesus. And I think he was, and I think he was because of some very fascinating pieces of evidence. One is that Josephus tells us three times that in 68, 69 AD, his commander was extremely old. He points it out three times. He actually says he was the oldest of the chief priests. You don't become the oldest of the chief priest by being a young man. you're old. And this means that he would have been minimum in his late 60s, but probably in his

70s or 80s, which would have meant he would have been in his 30s or 40s when Jesus was crucified. So he clearly would have been mature enough to be at the trial where his father and brother-in-law were presiding. But the other piece of evidence involves when Jesus was crucified. He was crucified. He was arrested on the night of Passover. And if you read the Old Testament and if you read Jewish tradition in the Talmud, the Mishnah, all of them agree. Faithful Jews are to travel to Jerusalem on the Passover to sacrifice a lamb. And they're supposed to meet in the house of their father and stay the night. This is to reenact when the Jews in Israel gather in the house of their father, sacrifice the lamb, and you weren't supposed to go out of the house

because the destroyer is going to pass over. Same things happened throughout the eons afterwards, that Jews are gathering in Jerusalem. They're sacrificing this lamb in the house of their father on the night of Passover. Sean, where was Jesus brought after he was arrested according to the Gospels? Do you remember? He was brought to the house of the house of the Lord. of Anas the high priest, who is the father of Josephus' commander, exactly when and exactly where Josephus' commander was supposed to be celebrating Passover and was not supposed to leave the house. So was Josephus' commander there at the trial?

It certainly looks very plausible that he's old enough. His father and brother-in-law are involved, and he would have been required by Jewish law to be in the house of his father at the same time that Jesus was brought there for trial. So I think that's just one of the candidates. There's 10 others in the book that I go through, but I think Josephus did know someone at the trial of Jesus who was an enemy of Jesus, actually,

and that's where he's getting his information from. That is so interesting. The gospel of John, of course, tells us he goes to Anis, and then goes to Caius. It doesn't tell us why, but you have pieced together a very plausible and fascinating connection. But again, you mentioned there's at least 10 connecting points there. That's only one.

People can go read those in that chapter towards the end of the book and make the assessment. But I love that. That's really, really interesting. Now, one kind of smaller objection I've heard, Tom, is that the testimony of Flavianum doesn't fit within the context of what Josephus is writing in book 18. And one of the responses I've heard from scholars, and I've used this insofar as it goes because it made sense to me, is that writers like Josephus and others at this time didn't have footnotes for writing. So sometimes there'd be a little bit of a kind of a choppy analysis

and they'd include it in the text in a way we would footnote it. Is that plausible? Or do you think it actually kind of more fits the context of book 18? It is true that Josephus was a patchwork writer and this is necessary in the ancient world. You don't have word processing. You can't write a paragraph and then easily transfer it somewhere else, you just have to kind of go stream of consciousness through. And Josephus is writing, you know, a massive, massively long history of the Jewish people. It's 300,000 words. I mean, that would be like, you know, an 800-page book today. So obviously we would expect choppiness. Obviously, we would expect things to to sometimes feel out of context. However, in this case, I think Josephus' discussion of Jesus fits remarkably well.

And that's because Josephus begins by introducing Jesus, or he talks about Jesus while he's talking about five or six stories of uproar, usually featuring Pontchus Pilate. He's talking about the reign of Pontchus Pilate. Pontchus Pilots was a bad guy. And he gives two stories where Pontius Pilots is doing some bad stuff to some Jews. Then he talks about another story involving Pontchus Pilate, which is the story of Jesus. And then he goes on to talk about this salacious story of some man seducing this woman that has nothing to do with Pontchus Pilate, nothing to do with Jews. It takes place in Rome. It's just this salacious piece of gossip. And then he goes on to talk about something else that doesn't really have to do with Jews either or Pontius Pilate. Although it's taking place during Pontius Pilots reign, it doesn't have anything to do with it. In that context, the story of Jesus fits perfectly.

I mean, it fits better than the other stories do. So I think that objection is very, very weak. I also show in my book that there are some Jewish traditions about Jesus. They're very hostile, negative traditions. But when you look at those traditions, they make even more sense about why Josephus placed the story. of Jesus where he did. You know, one of the stories, it's this slanderous story that alleges that Joseph seduced Mary one night and pretended to be someone else. This matches the story after the testimony of Flaviana where a man seduces a woman and pretends to be someone else.

Remarkably well. And there's another instance of this. So it fits in very well, especially when we consider the kind of Jewish background Joseph has had, it certainly fits better than some of the other stories that he strings along there. So I don't think that's any reason to suspect the story has somehow been manipulated or inserted. One more objection that I've heard, then we'll just kind of jump back and talk about maybe some of the criticisms of your viewpoint, the scholarly consensus. And I want to know what this means to you personally as well.

But one criticism that I've heard is that the term Christian, at least is translated into English, was just rarely used by the followers of Jesus, and yet it's ascribed to Josephus in this passage. Does that discount it, or would you argue that this might even be a piece of evidence for it? I think it's evidence for it. And that's because it is true. Christians rarely use that word. The New Testament only uses it three times. all three times you can interpret it as coming from non-Christians. The first is in the book of Acts where Luke says they were first called Christians in Antioch. The next is the book of Acts where Herod Agrippa II uses the word.

He says to the Apostle Paul, you know, do you really think you're going to make me become a Christian? Or he could say you almost, it depends how you translate it. But Agrippa the second uses it. And the third time is in First Peter where Peter says, don't be ashamed of the word Christian. as if it was being used as an insult against people. And Peter is trying to tell Christians, don't be ashamed of that, where it is a badge of honor.

So the fact that Josephus uses it makes a lot of sense because in the first century, Christians weren't using it very much, but non-Christians were. So it makes a lot of sense that he would have done it. What is even more interesting is that second reference that was by, in the book of Acts, It was by Herod Agrippa II, where he's presiding over the trial of the Apostle Paul.

Paul is evangelizing. He's preaching the gospel to this guy. And it causes Herod Agrippa to say, you know, do you think you'll make me a Christian in just the space of a few hours? Right. It turns out that Josephus was good friends with Herodigua II. They exchanged 62 letters. Herod Agrippa calls Josephus, my dearest friend, in one of the first. the excerpts that remains, he says to Josephus, when you come and see me, I will make known to you

matters that are not generally known. He's giving Josephus information. It may not be a coincidence that if Herod Agrippa uses the word Christian, well, why wouldn't Josephus? Herodigra was the last king of the Jews, and Josephus knew him very well. So that, by the way, is another indicator of the kind of connections Josephus had. He knew, he knew a man who put the Apostle Paul on trial. And he also tells us, you mentioned that James passage where Josephus speaks about the death of James, the brother of Jesus. The man who executes James is Anonis, who is Josephus's commander. So he also knows another person who put a different apostle on trial. He has enormous connections here and your viewers will have to read the book where I trace all of these out.

It's remarkable. 10 more or so. Yeah, that's really interesting. If I do, I just did a 10 year update on my hypothesis work. If I do another, I'm going to include some of these points that you address there that I had missed. There are so much more in your book. We've laid out, I'm just making this up, maybe 5 or 10% of the evidence you put forward.

So you've talked about the strengths. What do you think might be some of the weaknesses or just? vulnerable spots or maybe undeveloped areas of research that has yet to be explored tied to your thesis. The criticisms that I've heard so far are arguments from silence. Why didn't origin mention it? Why didn't early Christians? And we talked about that. A second one takes that one passage where I think something has been altered. And they say that I am admitting that Christians did alter the passage, therefore the whole passage is untrustworthy. I actually think that's probably the most powerful argument in response is to say that even according to my own thesis, there has been some

changes. Gotcha. My response to that would be, I would say a few things. One is that what is left in the passage is still pretty negative. If someone was trying to systematically change what the passage is saying, you would have expected them to use a different word than paradoxa for miracles, to use a different word than a pogamai for lead, to use a different word for all these other things, to use a different word for a peer. You would actually make it confess to resurrection. Instead, the only change is in this one area, which suggests that this is not a systematic endeavor to alter the passage, number one. Number two, this change doesn't sound like something a Christian would say, Jesus was. the Christ as if he's dead, he's no longer here. Christians say he is the Christ. He's alive right now. That's not just some abstract grammatical point. It's a vital, it's a core theological point of Christianity. It's the foundation of the Christian faith. So for a Christian scribe to alter that, you would have expected them to say he is the Christ, not was the Christ. And then on top of that, you would also expect that the readers, the later readers, would have interpreted that passage

as confessing that Josephus is confessing Jesus to be the Christ. But that's not how they interpreted it. Again and again and again, there is only one Greek author in all of history before the printing press that takes that phrase he was the Christ and interprets it as Josephus definitely believing in Jesus as the Christ. they all seem to have read the passage differently. There's a couple ambiguous cases, but they seem to have read the passage differently, and that's because in Greek,

I'm going to have to unfortunately use a little grammar here. In English, I refer to you as Sean, you refer to me as Tom. In Greek, I would refer to you as the Sean, and you'd refer to me as the Tom. So that phrase, he was the Christ in Greek, doesn't sound nearly as much like a confession of faith as it does in English. You can very easily interpret that as just an alternative name for Jesus. Just like today, people say Jesus Christ and they don't think he actually is the Christ. They use that as a name. Ancients did that as well. We have

ancient non-Christian writers using the word Christ as just an alternative name for Jesus. So that altered passage looks like, it doesn't look like something a Christian scribe intentionally alter. It also, in the reception history, Christians didn't read it as confessing Jesus was the Christ by and large. So it looks accidental. It looks like something just slipped out. It's preserved in the Latin. It's preserved in the Syriac. We don't have reasons to suspect that Christians were messing about with this passage to any significant extent. So in some ways, the two earliest references, non-Christian references to Christ, that are cited are Josephus, and the annals by Tacitus more early second century, probably 1.15 AD.

And typically people have said, well, Josephus maintains certain things about Jesus, but the wording is too positive to have come from someone who's a Jew. You're saying we should interpret this a little bit more like we do, the annals, in the sense that it describes Christians being hated for their abominations. It describes the source of the evil, which is this movement that's breaking out, it just describes Christians in such terms that obviously no Christian would have invented, which leans towards its authenticity. Now, the English might not be as clear in Josephus, but if we understand the context and the

range of words, you're basically saying these two passages are both critical of Christians, but sources reverencing key facts in the life of Jesus. Is that a fair comparison in your mind? I think certainly they can be viewed both negatively. The Tacitus one is definitely negative. The Josephus passage can very easily be taken as negative. It can also be taken as neutral or ambiguous. Okay.

If you could take it positively, but not in the fantastic pro-Christian way, you'd only be able to take it positively in the sense of him, kind of maybe liking Jesus, but not really liking his disciples and thinking they exaggerated all sorts of stuff and we're misleading people. So I prefer to say the passage is largely ambiguous, maybe with an air on the side of negativity, but that it's certainly not this fantastic pro-Christian statement.

That's really helpful because it's hard to take Tacitus writings neutral or possibly negative. It's very, very clear. So, yeah, great clarification. All right. So much more could be said about. this but has there have people i know it's the book is just out in fact i think you said in britain you can get a hard copy but not until august can you get a hard copy although the pdf is out you

wrote your article a while ago what has been the the consensus or just some of the criticism you've got from scholarship are people surprised are people ignoring it i know these things take a long time like it took me a decade to do an update on my book on the apostles because it just takes years for people to read and percolate and response and publish. What's the feedback so far? And maybe what do you expect? It's still early. I've been, I've been pleased so far. Some of the scholars that blurbed the book were very complimentary. Great. And I was surprised that they were as complimentary as they were. I've presented at several conferences where I've gotten very positive feedback also. I've been invited.

I'm scheduled actually October 8th to present at Princeton University on the book. And I've got some other talks that are set up as well. So it's getting buzz. I haven't heard any criticisms yet that are defeaters. I've learned there's a couple places in an appendix where I incorrectly cite a scholar. I feel bad about that. And I've written it down so that I can change that. There's things like that.

But in terms of the fundamental arguments, the substantive arguments I make, I haven't encountered any criticisms that I think are effective. And so it's still early. I'm still waiting. Maybe they will come. But my argument is not like a chain where one link gets broken and it all falls apart. It's a very tight web. So you'd have to break a lot of those strands in order to really overthrow the argument.

I'm confident it's going to stand. you know, time will tell. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, don't feel too bad about that, you know, mistaken citation. I kept for a decade of citations and corrections and people just set me stuff. It was actually really, really helpful. Some in favor. I kept a writing list, updated it. And then I just heard from somebody one slight misspelling in my newest edition. I'm like, oh, it doesn't matter how many times you read it, how many editors I had. There's always going to be something. and you just do your best. But I look forward to seeing just some of the criticism and scholarly engagement.

But when I've done interviews on my work, sometimes people don't ask me, though, just I love the question. What does this mean to you personally? So I would love to know whether your personal scholarship, your personal faith, your life, like just what you found and seen this published. Talk about it what it just means to you personally. I mean, there's a lot of aspects to that question. I mean, professionally, I'm grateful that I got the book published. It was a 10 or 12 year project. Wow.

So that was a very big, it was a big relief to finally get this out there. I felt like I was carrying it for so long. But beyond that, I think for me, the ramifications of this are one, it's a fascinating view under the Jesus of history, fascinating piece of evidence where we have this source who I think knew people, who are the enemies of Jesus. We don't have any other sources like that in the ancient world. So that's remarkable. But thirdly, I think that this provides remarkable corroboration of the four canonical Gospels

that Josephus gives the same outline of Jesus' life and ministry that we find in the Gospels. He says he was a wonder worker, though he uses a word that could be derogatory, but it's still a supernatural word. He says he had many disciples. He said that we didn't talk about this, but the vocabulary Josephus uses to describe Jesus' his teachings suggests kind of down-to-earth teachings. He wasn't like these highfalutin philosophers that have all these complicated things. That's exactly like the Jesus we see in the Gospels, pithy sermons, his parables, things like that.

And then Josephus says that people thought he was the Christ. He was accused by the Jewish leaders. He was executed, crucified by Pontchus Pilate, and that his disciples thought he was resurrected on the third day in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. That is remarkable corroboration of what the gospel say. And it shows that that idea that you see floating around on the Internet, you'll see some scholars saying this, this idea that the story, the report of Jesus' resurrection was this. elaboration or falsification that happened over decades that originally the original disciples didn't think Jesus was resurrected. That was a later Christian development when people exaggerated what happened. Josephus says that the disciples believed on the third day that he was raised to life.

And Josephus knows, as we spoke about, two different people who put the disciples on trial. And he corroborates the fact that they really did believe this. So I think this also shows that the story of the resurrection of Jesus began extremely early. It wasn't something that started 30 years, 40 years later. It was something that, as Josephus says, started on the third day after the crucifixion of Jesus. That's such a powerful point that comes from this. I got to tell you, your book is very readable. It's fascinating. One of my colleagues at Biola Ken Burding, I heard about this from a friend of mine who's a co-author sent me what this Talbot professor Ken Burdine wrote, this blog, he called it the earliest non-Christian testimony to Jesus Josephus turns out to be genuine. And he describes thoroughly enjoying reading your book. Now, he is a church historian. So his level of enjoyment, of course, he loves and revels in this stuff. up. But I did too. It's very readable. You have some scholarly points, as we would expect in a book with

Oxford Press. But it's like you're writing for the thoughtful, just kind of educated layperson with the scholarship to back it up for people who want to go further and assess it. So maybe tell us exactly where people can find a free PDF of your book. wonderfully a donor approached me and offered to make the e version the PDF version available for free which I am immensely undeserving and grateful for so you can get the PDF for free at josephus and Jesus.com the hardcover is coming out in the U.S. in August it's already out in the UK unfortunately it's academic library pricing so it's really expensive but you can get a free e version you can distribute it there's no limit you can send it to everyone

you want. You can download it repeatedly. That's fine. You also can go to the Institute for Christianreflection.org. I'm working with them and they're helping promote the book. That's another way you can learn more about the book or support them as they support me. And is that where people could follow you? Like, imagine people want to read this and then maybe know where scholarly critique comes up and your response. Like, where can people kind of follow this ongoing dialogue? I have an X account. They can follow me on X. You can also sign up for my newsletter. I have a sign up on the book website. Wonderful. Love it. Tom, this is so fascinating. It's not often that I read a book and I consider it a game changer. I've adopted the standard

viewpoint of Josephus and just resisted considering the entire passage authentic because of the apparent nature of it not being likely written by a Jewish writer like Josephus. But I think you've convinced me moving forward to be more positive. in favor of its authenticity. Of course, I look forward to seeing some of the feedback and criticism and the ongoing dialogue about this. But well done, fascinating, appreciate the decade of your life you put forward to this. I think you've served academia, served the church really well. And I can't encourage people more than just picking up a copy just to have it and working it through. I should say downloading a copy and sharing it with somebody else. Those of you follow this channel, this would be a great episode to

consider sharing with somebody. I would not have heard of this. If it were not for a friend and colleague of mine who shared it, as much as I travel in these, it was not on my radar. So if you know another believer or a skeptic, maybe share his book and his link or share this interview and ask them what they think and start a dialogue about it. And if you're interested in further historical Jesus studies, we'd love to have you at Talpa School of Theology. I teach a class even this fall on the resurrection. We're going to analyze Josephus. Tom, I'm going to send my class. the link to your book. I'm going to send them this interview, and we are going to talk about it.

So people watching, if you want to study apologetics, think about joining me at Talbot School Theology. We would absolutely love to have you. And make sure you hit subscribe. Lots of other interviews coming up, including a discussion on when atheists have near-death experiences, which is one you won't want to miss. Tom, thoroughly enjoyed this. Thanks for writing a great book, and thanks for your time. Many of us feel hurried. Did you know that being in a hurry is costing us more than we realize? Hi, I'm Gem Fadling, co-host of Unhurried Living,

where my husband, Alan, and I help people learn to live and lead from fullness rather than on empty. We provide resources and training to teach you healthy patterns for rest, work, and spiritual connection. With more than 25 years of experience at the intersection of spiritual formation and leadership development, Unhurried Living seeks to inspire others to rest deeper, live fuller, and lead better. Join us each week as we continue to have conversations about leadership, soul care, the power of prayer, and much more. You can find Unhurried Living at lifeadio.com and on your favorite podcasting app.