Truth Unites - Best Evidence for Jesus OUTSIDE the Bible (With Tom Schmidt)

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Gavin Ortlund and Tom Schmidt discuss historical evidence for Jesus in Josephus, particularly the Testimonium Flavianum.Read the book here: academic.oup.com/book/60034Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Do you think it's fair to speak of Josephus' testimony as the most important extra-biblical testimony about Christ? I do. Oh, yeah. Hands-down. Hands-down, it is. Based on all the factors, how confident are you that this paragraph is authentic to Josephus? I'm really, really confident. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Truth Unites, or welcome for the first time. If it's your first Truth Unites video, I am here with Dr. Tom Schmidt, who teaches at Fairfield University, and he's written a fantastic new book. that I'm excited for you to be aware of. You'll be interested in this topic if you're curious about historical testimony about Jesus, and basically what do we know about Jesus outside of the Bible?

One of my questions is going to be, is this subject matter we're getting into here maybe the most important testimony that we can find early on? So we'll get to that in a second. But first, Tom, thank you for taking the time. How are you doing today? Great. It's an awesome pleasure to be here on your channel, Gavin. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this. I learned about, and in a second I'll let you share about your book on how people can access it for free. And I know you want to say something about the Institute for Christian Reflection in a second, but I'll just say, amazing book. I try not to ever be sensationalistic in announcing a YouTube video or a topic, but I think this book is groundbreaking. And I know I'm not the only one who feels that way from reading the blurbs. This is really moving the ball forward. This is really advancing the conversation in what we can know historically. about who Jesus was. And so I really want to, and it's very readable. I was enjoying going through it the last few days.

So the title of the book is Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence for the One Called Christ. And I want my viewers to know that Dr. Schmidt is a very good academic. He has a PhD in Ancient Christianity from Yale University. He's published books with Cambridge University Press. This book is with Oxford University Press.

Correct me if any of that's wrong. Tell us about this book. First of all, tell us how people can access this book? The good news is that it's free online. It's free at josephusinjesus.com. That's the book website. A very, very generous donor who wanted to be anonymous has made it freely available. So you can purchase a copy. Unfortunately, it will be really expensive because it's an academic book. You can do that as well. It's out in the UK. It'll be out at the end of August in the US. And the book is also being being sponsored by the Institute for Christian Reflection, so you can check them out too.

I will put a link in the video description to make it really easy for viewers so they can access that and find that very easily. As someone who's published an academic book and then been dismayed at the cost of that, or more frequently now, I want to buy a academic book and been dismayed how expensive it is, that's pretty terrific that people can access it so easily. Okay, so I have so many questions. Let's just start with this. What initially drew you to the topic of Josephus and his testimony about Jesus? And maybe just tell us a little bit about who Josephus was. What isn't interesting about Josephus?

He's this first century Jewish author. He was a priest in Jerusalem, probably in the 50s, AD. He was born in Jerusalem. He was a Pharisee. He was a general in the Jewish army. And then he became a historian after the Jewish war. So he tells us so much stuff about the New Testament. He's, I think, the most important extra-biblical witness to what's going on in the Gospels and the Book of Acts,

you know, names that you see in the New Testament, you also see in Josephus. You see Herodius and Herodias and Herodus, Agrippa, Herod the Great, and Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, the High Priest, all these people he talks about. He also talks about Jesus, and he's usually thought of being the first non-Christian to give an account about Jesus, which is really interesting. But the problem is that what he says about Jesus is very controversial amongst scholars. Most scholars for a couple generations now, even longer,

for the past hundred years, have thought that what he says about Jesus isn't reliable. They've thought that it's been, whatever he said has been contaminated by Christian scribes in the medieval era or the ancient era, so that even though he probably said something, we as historians or as Christians can't use his testimony for independent knowledge about Jesus. So I wanted to look into that.

That's what drew me to it. I thought, hey, let me check this out. And one thing led to another. And it was a 10-year project this book. So it started as a paper and then an article. And then now it's this book coming out. Do you think it's fair to speak of Josephus' testimony as the most important extra-biblical testimony about Christ? I do. Oh, yeah. Hands down. Hands down, it is. And we're talking around 93, 94 AD that this was written. You can correct me on that if that's off base. So we're very soon after, you know, end of the first century there. Tell us a little bit about the scholarly controversy here. Let's try to steal man some of the skepticism if we can. What are some of the reasons, you know, people point out the flattering language. It seems very positive about Jesus, which you wouldn't expect necessarily. Tell us some of the reasons why people,

are skeptical that all or some of this actually is authentic to Josephus. There are two main reasons. The reasons are that he's extremely flattering to Jesus, so flattering that it feels like he would have to be a Christian to say some of the things that he says. And we know he wasn't. We know that he was Jewish. So that's cause for suspicion. The second cause for suspicion is that scholars will claim that the style of the passage,

like the word usage, the grammar, doesn't match what Josephus uses elsewhere. We have almost half a million words of what Josephus published, so we have a large sample size to look at how he uses language. And scholars have said that there's phrases in here that just don't match with what we know Josephus would use. Those are the two big reasons. I believe those reasons. I thought those were really good reasons. They made sense to me.

I thought that the passage had been interpolated. It had been messed about with, monkeyed with by later Christian scribes. That was my thinking, and I thought maybe I could kind of figure out what the more authentic version is, peel away some of the alterations. But the more I looked into it, which we could talk about, the more I realized those two reasons don't add up when you actually start looking at the data. Okay, so in a second, I want to start asking you about that data and what's convinced you it is authentic. First, I'm going to have my video editor, Zephaniah, put up the, we're going to call it the Testimonium Flavianum.

Have I said that, pronounced it correctly? And let's just call it the TF moving forward so that we don't have to pronounce all the syllables there. I'm going to put that up on the screen so viewers can read through it while you answer this question. But I just would love, we don't need to read through it, but just tell us basically what is the content here. Can you summarize what Josephus says? We find this passage in the book of Josephus's antiquities. It's this large 300,000-word history of the Jewish people that Josephus wrote around 93, 94 AD. And when he comes to the reign of Pontchus Pilate, which I think your viewers will recognize that name,

he talks about various things that Pontius Pilate was doing, most of them not very nice. And then he gives this paragraph about Jesus. And he says that he ministered during the reign of Pontchus Pilate, that he was a wise man, that he had many disciples who were both Jewish and Greek, that he worked miracles, that he was, that he, this is how it's normally translated. He was the Christ, which sounds like a confession of faith. He goes on to say that at the accusation of the first men among the Jewish people, he was crucified by Pontius Pilate. and that three days later he rose again in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy and that the tribe of the Christians still remains to Josephus' present day. So as the passage is typically translated, and as I have kind of briefly summarized it, there's a few things in there that he calls

Jesus the Christ. That's strange. I mean, you can't be a non-Christian and call Jesus the Christ. It doesn't make sense. And then also he says Jesus was resurrected. He says that he fulfilled. Jewish prophecy. He says Jesus worked miracles. I mean, this all just, you know, it all adds up as being very suspicious, at least compared to how the passage is normally translated. Yeah. Yeah, in first blush, people might think it sounds too good to be true as a corroborative testimony. Oh, so as I read through your book, my understanding is you're kind of amassing a series of different arguments for its authenticity. some of them are internal with the language and the phraseology and so forth. Some of them have to do with the reception of Josephus subsequently and so forth.

Maybe we'll start with just the language itself. Maybe we can start with this very point about the overly flattering nature of it to Jesus. How do you interact with that? And why, in your mind, is that not an argument against the authenticity of it? I think if the passage was as flattering as is typically translated, then it is a good argument against. the authenticity of the passage. The issue, though, that I unveil in the book is that when you look at how Josephus uses the same words and phrases elsewhere, you notice two things. One, he uses the same

phrases elsewhere. It sounds like Josephus. It sounds like his style. So that first argument against against the authenticity where it doesn't match Josephus' style doesn't seem to hold up. But the second, more interesting thing is that when you look at those passages that have parallels, linguistic parallels, we all of a sudden realize that he doesn't seem to use those passages in nearly a flattering way, as we think. For example, when he says that Jesus worked miracles, Greek, Josephus is writing in Greek. Greek is a vocabulary rich language. It has lots and lots of words. They have lots of word for miracles. But the specific word that Josephus uses is paradoxa, which is kind of suspicious. He uses the same word to describe the miracles wrought by Pharaoh's magicians, for instance.

These are miracles that in Greek would come from uncertain origin, potentially negative origin, potentially malevolent forces. And so this is what we see in the Gospels, where the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, would admit Jesus were. miracles, but they'd say, well, he's doing it in league with demons and things like this. In other words, it seems like Josephus might be saying the same thing. This doesn't look like a compliment. And we find that with other passages, too. When he says that Jesus was resurrected, he actually says he appeared to the disciples alive again.

But when we look at that Greek construction, a better translation is really, he seemed to them to be alive again. meaning that he's not reporting, he's not affirming or confessing the resurrection. He's just reporting what the disciples said about the resurrection. Am I right that there's a similar issue with the reference to Jesus as the Christ? That he, Josephus is reporting a fact about how Jesus was regarded, not making a personal confession of belief, of his own belief or something like that. Right, yeah. And that one is a little trickier because I think,

what's actually going on there is that Josephus actually talks about Jesus in one other location. It's a very brief reference. It's later on where he says that he's talking about how some high priest was defrocked. He lost his high priesthood. And the reason why is because he had, in Josephus's words, James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ, illegally executed. And there he does say that he does use Christ language with Jesus, but he doesn't say he was the Christ, he says he was called the Christ. And that feels like a lot more, you know, a lot less suspicious language. He's just reporting what people called him. So in the Greek, the original Greek of Josephus' testimony in Flavianum, that passage about Jesus, the larger passage,

it reads literally he was the Christ. But there's an ancient Latin translation of this passage, and there's an ancient Syriac translation of this passage, and they don't say that. They say he was believed to be the Christ or he was thought to be the Christ. And that sounds a lot like what Josephus says elsewhere when he was called to be the Christ. So this is typical textual criticism. Whenever scholars are assembling in ancient texts, they look at all the textual witnesses, and they look at ancient translations and things like this. So what it looks like happened here is that something got messed up in the Greek text,

but fortunately the ancient Latin and Syriac translators had an uncorrupted Greek manuscript in front of them. And there Josephus said that Jesus was thought to be the Christ, which sounds much more Josephan. Is there anything else in the language or the phrasing of the actual passage that you want to comment on that you think is relevant to its authenticity? If not, then we'll move on to how it was to its reception. I think actually almost everything is relative to is is it has to do with the authenticity. I show that like almost every single phrase has parallels. In fact, every phrase does. And almost every single word can be indexed back to Josephus.

I do a frequency, a word frequency rate test. So I look at how frequently Josephus uses rare words, how frequently he uses common words. And the same frequency patterns are evident. in the passage. So it really looks like it's from him. Some other things to note is that he calls the disciples. He says that they received Jesus' teachings with pleasure. Sounds a little positive to us, but in Greek it actually sounds a bit more negative. Josephus, he loves that phrase to receive something with pleasure, and he uses it to describe people who are like overzealous or naive. And that jibes with the New Testament. I mean, Jesus' disciples are portrayed as being overly zealous. They're

trying to cast fire down from heaven. They don't understand what's going on. They're not, they're not sober-minded about things. So there's another little aspect of the passage that feels like it must come from Josephus. Let's suppose just looking at the internal evidence, if you're reading a lot of Josephus, you know his authorly voice, you know, you get a sense of a knack for his vocabulary and phrasing and so forth. Is there anything in this particular paragraph that would throw you off or feel different from Josephus's normal writerly voice? I don't think so. The one kind of gotcha that has been used by scholars before was that there's a word that Josephus uses in the, in the testimony in Flavianum, that he uses nowhere else. And this was thought of as being very suspicious

because Josephus wrote almost half a million words. So it's really weird that there would be this one unique hopox ligamina that he doesn't use anywhere else. In my research, though, I do a word counts. And it turns out Josephus has like this enormous, enormous vocabulary. And he actually uses over 5,000 words only once. They're just totally unique. And what that means is that he uses a unique word. every 87 words and the passage is 90 words long. So he actually should use a unique word. So that

one unique word is actually in context a marker of authenticity because it matches his frequency rate of using unique words. Right on schedule. Amazing. Okay, let's talk about the external evidence. So let's talk about the reception of Josephus. What about this indicates to you the authenticity of this particular paragraph. What we've been talking about is reflected in the reception history. If you look at how ancient and medieval authors dealt with this particular passage, they quote from it many times. There's about 18 to 20 quotations of it in ancient and medieval Greek literature.

And if you go through all of those instances, it's fascinating because those ancient and medieval writers seem to be reading the passage the same way that I am suggesting we should understand the passage. In other words, they don't seem to see these fantastic details that modern scholars see, even though they have just quoted the same passage. They'll quote the passage, and then they'll talk about the chronology of Jesus' ministry. They'll point out the number of his disciples. They'll talk about Jewish culpability in Jesus' death because Josephus says the first men of the Jews accused Jesus. They'll talk about the nature of Jesus' teaching. They don't talk about the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, that he was the Christ. They don't talk about that he was raised

from the dead, which all seem like, how are they missing this? And the only, I think, reasonable explanation is because they're reading it, like how I propose we should read it. They're reading it with how Josephus uses language. They understand these categories in Greek, and they understand that this passage is not this confession of faith. It's a historical report about Jesus. And from their perspective, they think it's interesting, but they're not, you know, overly taken by it, by and large. Yeah. I hope this question is okay to ask, but how, based on all the factors, how confident are you that this paragraph is authentic to Josephus? Would you put it in the ballpark of like 90% or more like 99% or kind of can you help us get a sense of bearings like that?

I'm really, really confident. I mean, the number, you can read in my book in Chapter 3 and 4, I go through all the linguistic parallels. And it's stunning. It's stunning how many parallels there are and how many of them color the passage in a much more ambiguous or negative light. And it also matches the reception history.

This is how ancient and medieval Greek authors read the passage. So it all, it all makes sense. And in order to dethrone it, you'd have to, I mean, it's not just, you know, it's not an argument that's formed link by link by link. It's this web of arguments. So if you, if you cut one strand, the argument still stands. You'd have to, you'd have to cut a lot of strands. And I don't think that's possible to do. So I would bet quite a bit on it. Yeah, I'm somewhat of a nerd in this way, but when there's really good scholarly work like this that kind of turns the discussion, I find that so cool. And so I think this is, as I read your book, I experienced it to be very convincing, just like you're describing there. Go ahead, please jump in.

One more thing I'll add is that the way scholars have treated this passage, about 100 years ago, scholars were pretty united, that the passage was a wholesale forgery, that some, scribe just shoved the passage in there at some point back in history and that percolated through the manuscripts that we have today but that changed when this this famous scholar henry thackeray he's the one who translated much of the josephan volumes for the lobe classical library those little green volumes and he thought the passage was forged but then after he spent years working on josephus he changed his mind and he has this fabulous lecture that he gave that's published this is 100 years ago where he points out these parallels and he says, look, like, this sounds like Josephus.

It might not all be authentic, but certainly much of it is. And so the scholars have continued on that path. So over the past hundred years, there's been this move to view the passage as more and more and more authentic to the point where scholars will, the majority of scholars believe it's authentic. There's been some things that have been changed,

maybe tweaked here and there, or maybe one sentence was added or something like that, but that by and large, it's authentic. What I'm doing is harnessing new databases, but, you know, 20 years ago, scholars didn't have access to these searchable databases. And I'm showing that actually we have even more parallels and we have ways of showing that this passage,

even those places that, you know, 40 years ago scholars thought were suspicious, really aren't suspicious. So this is following a trajectory. So in some ways I'm overturning something, but in other ways I'm really, just following the path that scholarship has been going down. Yeah.

I wrote a paper on this, which I can hardly remember back when I was an undergrad. Okay. And so back in 2005 or 2006, maybe, you know, probably 2005 at the University of Georgia, I was a religion major. I wrote a test of paper on this. And my recollection, I remember almost nothing from the paper except, I think at that time, my sense was most scholars were saying the basic shell is authentic, but then there's just been a couple of like embellishments added in. So, so, you know, 20 years ago, would that have been a

common scholarly view? And, and is it then fair to say that at a minimum, this is giving us testimony of Jesus? It's just a question of how much detail it's giving us in that discussion. Precisely. Yeah. The scholarly consensus, Meyer is the one. He wrote the multi-volume set marginal Jew about Jesus. It's this very famous work of scholarship. And he theorized that there were three modifications made to the passage. Many scholars have either followed that explicitly, or they have thought that Meyer was basically correct. They weren't maybe willing to say it was just three or they thought it was slightly less, but they effectively followed that. And what that meant is where scholars stood originally is that, yes, Josephus did say something about Jesus. He

and it probably followed the lines of what you see in the passage, followed the general outlines, but all the sensational stuff was toned down. And what I'm saying is, actually, if you just look at how Josephus uses these same words and phrases, you can just tone the passage down relative to Josephus, and there's no need to speculate that things have been altered. Why do you think previous scholars have missed the observations that you're making that lead you to that conclusion? I think there's two reasons. One is that this kind of fabulous rendition of the passage comes out of Latin tradition.

There's several different medieval or ancient Latin translations of the passage that render it in this fabulous light. And I think that has percolated through Western scholarship up to the modern age. And so scholars had kind of inherited this overly rosy picture of the passage that was influenced by some of these Latin translations. That's one reason. The second reason is databases, that the parallels that I was able to find, the statistics that I was able to assemble are impossible to find without databases. The human mind, we just don't work that way. We can't read half a million words in Greek and keep track of it all in our heads. We just don't operate that way. And so those scholars of old didn't have access to those kinds of resources. That one scholar I mentioned, Thackeray, who a hundred years ago changed his mind, he actually manually assembled a concordance of Josephus to keep track of words and phrases. And he was able to come across several parallels that way. But of course, doing that by hand is impossible.

It's better than nothing, but it's nothing like having a quickly searchable computer database at your fingertips. The internet at least does some good things, even if we are worried about other things. It is interesting the way searchable databases affect scholarship in various subjects. So in a second, we're going to get to some of the implications for worldview. So for some viewers of this video who are Christians, others who may be interested in Christianity, but not a Christian themselves, you know, what does all this mean for our understanding of Jesus and so forth? But before that, I really want to ask you about what was the most surprising and interesting part of your book for me,

and that's the connection that you argue Josephus had with those who personally encounter Jesus on some level, if I'm getting that right. Can you develop this and explain this a little bit to start off with? That was actually an afterthought in my book. I was done with the book. What is now part one was the book. It was just arguing for the authenticity of the passage, and it got accepted by Oxford. I was writing the conclusion, and I thought that I really should do some research on where Joseph is.

is getting his information about Jesus. Is he using a Christian source or is he using non-Christian sources? Because if he's relying on a Christian source, then what he has to say isn't as interesting because especially if he's using something like the Gospel of Luke, which we already have today. So I wanted to look into that. And that's when I started realizing that this guy, Josephus, was fabulously well-connected in ancient Jerusalem. in first century Jerusalem. I mentioned already he was born in 37 AD in Jerusalem. He was born to an eminent, eminent priestly family, also of royal descent. He became a Pharisee when he was 19 years

old. When he was 20 or 25, he became a priest. When he was 25, he was so famous that he met the empress of Rome to advocate for the release of certain eminent priests. When he was 30, he became a general in the Jewish army. There were seven generals appointed, and then there were two Supreme commanders. And keep in mind that it's not like today. So given that he was a general, it had a lot, it wasn't just a military position. It was a political, civil position. And he was appointed as ruler of Galilee. He was the general of Galilee. So he tells us that he went to Copernum. He went to Cana. He went to Tiberius. He walked where Jesus walked. He lived in Sephirus, which was three miles down the road from Nazareth. So this individual was enormously

well connected. He grew up in Jerusalem in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. He lived in Galilee in the 60s. He sounds like the kind of guy who would have encountered people who knew Jesus just 10, 20, 30 years before. And that's when I was reading the testimony in Flavianum. Again, I'd read it hundreds of times. I'd translated it. I looked at it in Latin and Greek and Syriac and Arabic. And something jumped out at me that I'd never noticed before. And it's crazy when that happens. It was kind of this aha moment.

And I realized that when Josephus is describing how Jesus was executed, he says that it was the first men who accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate. And that phrase first men, in Greek, it's the proto-toy, that rang some bell within my subconscious. And I thought, I think I've seen that before. Where have I seen that before? Where have I seen him use that word before? So what did I do?

I went to the databases. And I searched for proto-toy. And all of a sudden, I realized that it's because Josephus wrote an autobiography of his life. That's why we know so much about him. And in the autobiography, he says, multiple times, I knew the proto-toy of Jerusalem. I met with them continually. And so here we have him saying it was the pro toy, the first man who accused Jesus. And then 20 years later in 51, 52 AD, Josephus says, I was meeting continually with the pro toy.

And he repeats that several times over the next 20 years. And I thought, surely some of those protoi who accused Jesus were around 20 years later. You know, the first men are going to be older men. So if you were 45 years old, you're going to be 65. Some of them must have been around. And that got me on, you know, the scent. And I started wondering if maybe, because we know so much about Josephus, he tells us so much information about people he knew,

what if, is there any way we could figure out the names of the people he's talking about, that the names of people who were the first men, who might have been at the trial of Jesus, who might have accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate. And that's what I do in the final chapter of the book, where I have 10 or 11 candidates that have various levels of probability, but these are 10 or 11 individuals who Josephus knew or probably knew. Some of them are definite.

Some of them are probable. But then who also probably or definitely were at the trial of Jesus. And I make the case that not only do I think he knew people, I think we know some of the names of the people who were at. the trial of Jesus and whom Josephus also knew. I want to make sure I understand the chronology exactly. So Josephus is writing his autobiography. He's describing his recollections of conversations he had between 50 and 70.

Am I getting that right? Okay. And the word pro-toy came up. Am I understanding this is like members of the Sanhedron? How is that term being used exactly? The term, it's a catch-all term for the Jewish leader. So it would refer to members of the Sanhedron. It would also refer to the chief priests, which are two different categories.

You could have priests that were also part of the Sanhedron, but you could also be a Sanhedron member and not be part of the priesthood. So those two leaders, and then it probably also refers to political leaders, like members of the Herodian dynasty. So the kings, the Jewish kings that are subservient to Rome, but still have the royal authority to some extent. Okay. Fascinating.

What more do we know about the history of the Sanhedron going into that time period. If I'm remembering correctly, the name Caiaphas comes to my mind as the high priest from the New Testament, can you flesh out the picture a little bit as it moves forward, like toward those times, like the 50s? Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about the Sanhedron. Most of what we know about the Sanhedron, we get from the New Testament or we get it from Josephus, but he gives vague descriptions. He mentions the Sanhedron several times, even many times, But other than just referring to the Sanhedrine as this enormously powerful religious political body in Jerusalem, he doesn't tell us a ton about it. To that, to get other insight, we have to go to the Jewish Mishnah and the Talmud.

These are Jewish religious documents that were preserved over generations. And they have a tractate called the Sanhedron tractate. And in this, they tell us how the Sanhedron was to operate. And in there, you know, we find out a number of things. We find out that the Sanhedron was made up of 70 members, 70 or 71 members, and that these were leading Jewish figures. They were often Pharisees, sometimes Sadducees, rabbis, they could be priests. We know that the high priest was in charge of the Sanhedron, but it seems like the high priest

was not actually a member, that there was a different leader of the Sanhedron. then the high priest had sort of like this could call the Sanhedron order. It might be sort of like the American political system where you have the Senate and a leader in the Senate, but then the president, or at least in America, the vice president is sort of involved too. So it's a little complicated. We don't understand all the details. But one thing we do know is that according to the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud, that the Sanhedron would have criminal trials, where if someone was charged with blasphemy or with being a false prophet, they would be brought before the Sanhedron. And there were specific things that the Sanhedron had to do in this kind of trial.

And these stipulations actually match what happens to Jesus quite well in the Gospels. It seems like he had an actual Sanhedron trial before the high priest, before the head of the Sanhedron, and before the whole body. It was a plenary session where all 70 members had to be there. That's what the New Testament describes. It says all the Sanhedron was there, the high priest was there. And when you read the Mishnah, it says that, yes, for regular trials, you just need a dozen or so members. But for a trial of a false profit, you need all 70 people there.

So that matches with the New Testament. As I'm thinking of the time frame here from 30 AD to 50 and into the 50s, I'm thinking back to 20 years ago, you know, 2005. and so we're dealing with that span of time, two decades. Am I right to conclude that it seems incredibly improbable that there's going to be a huge amount of distortion and garbling of facts about what the Sanhedron would have done from 30 AD to the beginning of Josephus' acquaintances and conversations? I think you're right.

You know, I remember September 11th very well, and that was what 24, 25 years ago now, and I'm sure many of your viewers do also. keep in mind that we're not, you know, we want to be careful to define what we mean by tradition or transmission because I show in the book that Josephus would have known, he did know, members of the Sanhedron personally. He knew the head of the Sanhedron in 60, 65, 68 AD. And he knew high priests, he knew chief priests. So it's not like Josephus was really, relying on rumors. He at minimum knows people who would have been extremely close to people involved

in the trial of Jesus. But I think he actually is closer than that. I think Josephus knew people who were at the trial of Jesus. Is there any possible motive that we can imagine Josephus might have for narrating something that isn't truthful? Because as I'm turning this over in my mind, And I can't imagine that he would have any motive to do that. I can't imagine anything. Can you? I agree. It's hard to come up with a plausible reason why he would not,

why he would try and exaggerate Jesus or tell the truth about Jesus. You know, Christians at this time, they're not in power. Like he doesn't have anything to fear from them. And then he doesn't have anything to fear from Pontius Pilate. He's been dead for decades and decades and decades. And he doesn't have anything to fear from the chief priests in the Sanhedron. They've also been dead for a while. This is 94 AD.

So I think that he just gave his honest take on what happened at the trial of Jesus and what happened at the ministry of Jesus. It's compressed. It's 90 words long. So we're not talking about a huge, you know, multi-book discussion. But I think we can trust what he has to say. One of the things I do when I'm engaging in apologetics, because I'm a Christian, I like defending Christianity, is I want to avoid anything that's triumphalist. There can be temptations when we're doing apologetics about overstating our case or acting like something's obvious, and I always want to be careful and listen to push back and that kind of thing.

So I want to avoid triumphalism. So I'm trying to assess all of this as we kind of move into the final section of the video and kind of get to implications of this and how Christians should feel about this. how those looking into Christianity, what conclusions we should draw. So wanting to avoid triumphalism, but I'm so afraid of that, that I've actually had to be careful in the other direction that I don't understate things at times or state things too modestly. I just did a video on the resurrection. I was trying to find that balance of stating evidence with sufficient forcefulness,

but never in a triumphalist way. So how do we do that with this? I mean, what would you say, would it be fair to say that Josephus' testimony makes the basic facts that he reports historically certain or historically very probable? Or how would you start to use language to describe the findings of this and the significance of this? Does that make sense what I'm trying to ask you there? That's a great question, Gavin. And it's very wise also to not be sensationalistic, to treat the data soberly and to weigh it carefully.

I think that Josephus provides corroboration for the New Testament. You know, anything historically, in fact, most things that we can know or learn about escape absolute certainty. And that's for almost all aspects of human life. So ancient history is no different. Certainty alludes us. But in this case, I think Josephus corroborates in a remarkable way what the gospel say about. the contours of Jesus' life and ministry and also regarding the trial of Jesus. And I think that Josephus also corroborates the idea that the apostles really did believe

he was raised from the dead on the third day. There's some theories out there by scholars that, you know, they think that perhaps the story of Jesus' miracles and resurrection were slowly exaggerated over generations or decades. The disciples may not have actually believed this. This is something they convinced themselves later on, or it's something that later Christians exaggerated, like, you know, coral growing on a reef over the generations or like a game of telephone. But I think what Josephus tells us is that the disciples actually believed this. He says that it seemed to them that he was alive again on the third day. And Josephus, if you read his writings, is very capable, very capable of unmasking false prophets, of criticizing,

He laughs at wizards and things like that. He doesn't think those are real. But with Jesus, he's definitely, if you read him carefully, he's skeptical. He does think he did miracles, but he isn't quite sure where the power is coming from. But he doesn't dismiss these things. He doesn't dismiss the apostles as liars or pretenders, which he does elsewhere with other people. So I think he corroborates the New Testament, and it shows that this belief in the resurrection of Jesus is not this artifact that happened 40 years after Jesus died. It was something that emerged very quickly on the third day, as Josephus says, and spread. Now, I'm a Christian, but I know not all your viewers are. This isn't absolute proof that Jesus actually was resurrected or that he worked miracles,

but it does show that the Gospels don't appear to be exaggerating what the disciples believed happened. Yes. Okay, so let me share how I'm experiencing this from reading your book and talking with you and then ask you if this is a fair reaction that I'm having. So you can steer my thinking a little bit if you need to. But one of the things that I'm struck by as I just think about this is the details that are included by Josephus seem like a very, they seem very, consonant with the basic message of the New Testament. It's not as though the New Testament portrays Christ as a Messiah, whereas in Josephus, he's just like a teacher or something like this. You've got, he's called the Christ, he's doing miracles, and the little detail you just mentioned really stands out to me on the third day. Because as I've been studying about the resurrection,

it's so interesting that that little detail, you know, it's never the fourth or the second. You have all this different testimony from very early that mentions that. timing for the resurrection, which is interesting. So am I, am I off base in saying this looks like it's very consistent? It almost feels like just, you use the word corroboration, it just feels like it's basically repeating the basic content of the New Testament. Is that putting it too strong? I would say that, yes, he is, but he's putting his own spin on it. And he's doing this in several ways. So one way is simply the language that he's using. That phrase you pointed out on the third day. That's how we say it in English on the third day. Greek is a very complicated technical

language. They have lots and lots of ways to say on the third day. And if you look at how Christians would articulate that in antiquity, they had many ways of doing it. When you read the testimony in Flavianum, when you read the passage about Jesus, Josephus uses a really strange phrase. He says, having the third day, this is something he uses all over the place. When he says, having the third day, he means on the third day. When he says having the eighth day, he means on the eighth day. It's just how he uses his own idiosyncratic way of expressing things. There is no record of Christians ever using that phrase to describe the resurrection of Jesus on the third day in the first three or four or five centuries. So he's clearly putting his

own spin on it linguistically. He's also doing his own take on it. So there are a few things in the passage that are in tension with the New Testament. And these are fairly mind. But for instance, Josephus says that Jesus had many disciples. Well, the New Testament says the same thing. If you read it broadly, thousands of people followed him and heard him preach. But Josephus has a detail. He says he had many Greek disciples. And that appears to be something the New Testament contradicts.

The New Testament says he came only for the lost sheep of the tribes of Israel, that he tells the apostles only preach to the Jewish people. The portrayal of him, he does interact with Gentiles at times. He plausibly had some non-Jewish disciples. But the New Testament nowhere speaks about many Greeks or Gentiles following Jesus. So that's something that Josephus is getting from somewhere. One plausible avenue for that is that he knows in 93 AD that there's actually a lot of Gentile followers of Jesus in his day. He knows there were some back in the day, and so he's just sort of conflating the two together.

That's one possibility. Another one is that he actually places Jesus, the story of Jesus. He talks about Jesus before he talks about John the Baptist. And so your listeners know he does talk about John the Baptist. It's a fascinating passage in Josephus. But he talks about Jesus first, which seems no Christian would ever do that. It's the universal gospel testimony and early Christian testimony that John preached first, and this isn't just a chronological issue.

It's a theological issue because John is preparing the way for the Messiah to come. So that shows, number one, this doesn't look like something a Christian would have said. This looks like something Josephus would have said. Why he does this has been debated by scholars. One, I think the most plausible, the most plausible, the most plausible. explanation for it is that we know that if anyone tries if you've ever sat down and tried to write a

universal history you'll find out really quick it's very hard to put things in order it's actually impossible to do that you have to jump around and we know Josephus did that because he will sometimes talk about the same series of events multiple times but he'll do it in different order so it's

possible that he's just to him it doesn't really matter if John came before or after so he just he just talked about them when it was convenient that that's probably what's going on there. But you see that he is following the New Testament, but he's tweaking some things here and there, not in major ways.

And when I say following the New Testament, I don't mean he's using New Testament documents. He's reporting the same general outline of the life of Jesus. Yeah. How should we feel about the timing of Josephus's testimony? And let me explain this. So in my thinking, I'm aware that many scholars will find those parts of the New Testament that are written earlier to be more reliable. So many will look at Mark

and feel that this is going to give us better historical information than John because it's written earlier. And then you've got Paul's letters going back even earlier into the 50s. Now Josephus is writing into the 90s, 93, 94. However, from what you're sharing, he's recalling conversations he had with people in the 50s. So in the overall flow of the first century, Where do you locate Josephus in terms of sort of the timing of his testimony? I think when you're assessing historical sources, we have to do more than just one litmus test. It's not simply who's closer chronologically. Obviously, being closer chronologically is good.

That's a marker of potential quality. But it's not the only one. So if you are using an ancient source that is a couple hundred years removed from the event, which is very common in ancient history. But this ancient source was in turn using the original papers of the subject, you know, the person at hand. You might have a fabulously accurate source there. And we have examples of the opposite where you'll have a source that is very, very close by, even contemporary with. And they're not trustworthy because they don't like the person they're talking about or because they're worried, they might get in trouble for saying the wrong thing.

This is the same reason why, you know, it doesn't matter what. where you are on the political spectrum, but you can look at newspapers today and find certain headlines to be extraordinarily misleading, even though it's contemporary. And you might prefer to look at a sober account written 20 years after the fact because of those reasons. So I want to be careful just relying on chronology. It's a good marker. We have to keep it in mind. And in Josephus' case, we have someone writing in 93-94, which by ancient standards is extraordinary. I mean, for almost every person in history. We wish we had someone writing 60 years after their death. But in this case, it's a little better than 60 years because, as you said, he was born in 37 in Jerusalem.

He says in 51 or 52, he began interacting with the first, the pro toy of Jerusalem. He knew the high priests. He knew the chief priests. He knew the head of the Sanhedrine. He knew Pharisees. he knew the Herodian dynasty. So clearly he is drawing from memories and interactions, probably documents, that are much older than just 93, 94 AD. Amazing. Okay, a couple of final questions here. I mean, one thing that comes to my mind is whenever I find confirmation of some things

that the Gospels have then reported, this increases my general trust in them overall for the other things that it's reported that aren't corroborated. rated. Do you think that that is one valid response to what you're pointing out with Josephus, is that basically it tells us the Gospels and the New Testament generally are trustworthy and to be taken as, yeah, I've used this word endearing to describe New Testament documents. That's how I feel. I feel I trust them the way they don't portray themselves sympathetically. their inclusion of embarrassing details. There's so many things about the nature of these witnesses

that makes me in my heart say, I trust these people. I don't think they're trying to pull the wool over my eyes. And when I read this passage in Josephus, it has a similar effect upon me. Do you think that's valid? I think that's very fair. And for two reasons.

One is that it does lend credence to the gospel narratives. But secondly, just like how you mentioned, that the New Testament documents will, you know, what will say very embarrassing things about themselves. Josephus says things about Jesus. You know, he uses that word paradox that we've talked about. He describes the disciples as potentially being hot-headed. He says that it was the first men who accused Jesus

before Pontius Pilate after Jesus had been leading over all these Jews and Greeks. It almost looks like he's portraying Jesus as an insurrectionist potentially. He doesn't say, those words, but what this means is that this passage just doesn't look like it came from a Christian source. It looks like it's a Jewish source, which lends credibility to trusting the passage and therefore lends credibility to what the Gospels are saying. You know, in my life,

I, you know, this is my profession. I'm a New Testament scholar, ancient Christian scholar, so I'm always tracking down sources. I'm always looking at scholars who say the New Testament got this wrong or got that wrong. And again and again, the New Testament, I think, is found reliable. There's discovery after discovery over the past hundred years has shown this. You know, a great example is the pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, which scholars thought never existed. And there was actually some German scholars, which tried to convict John of making this up. But then we found it archaeologically. I mean, you can, it's there and everybody admits it. that it's there now, and there's several instances of this happening. So I think that it's important

to be, you know, to understand that we walk by faith, not by sight. And that's not a bad thing. I mean, that's what the message of the New Testament is. It's also just the reality of our human condition for most things, personal relationships with people, the fact if you have a job tomorrow, you know, all those kinds of things, you have to trust. So it's important to not be too triumphalist about this. But I do think it does lend credence and credibility to the gospel narratives. Yeah. Let me ask you a final big question and then a final small question. The final big question is let's imagine two types of viewers watching this video and we'll speak to them from all of this. The first type of person is an anxious Christian. There's someone who has a Christian faith, but the

feel anxiety in their heart about, is this really true? Can I really trust this? Maybe they've heard, you know, I've heard people say there's no historical evidence for Jesus outside of the Bible, which of course is, you know, that's one claim that is directly being challenged by your work. And of course, Josephus is not the only example of that. But that is the kind of thing we'll hear, or more, more reasonably, there can be other kinds of doubts that will come in and someone has this feeling of, I think this is true, but honestly, there's like a, you know, you're 60 or 70 percent certain, but closing the gap toward a kind of existential peace is more difficult. And the second type of person who might feel this is an inquiring person who may be exploring Christianity,

maybe even leaning towards it, a little bit sympathetic or open, but struggled with that closing of the gap and struggle to kind of reach home plate and come to personal faith. based upon all of your work in this book and elsewhere, as a scholar of early Christianity, what can you say to help those types of viewers to pastor them, to counsel them, to encourage them, to find peace and confidence in faith? That's a great question, Gavin. I think it would really depend on the individual, that these discussions were having. having, they're valuable, they're important, but they're not the most important things.

And that for some people who are struggling, it might be a simple matter of the evidence. They've heard the New Testament is unreliable. So something like this might really help them. For others, it's just a curiosity, and it's one of the many avenues they want to explore, and this can help clear away some of the doubts. But I think for many people, you know, as Christians, we believe that Christ shepherds us and that if you're struggling with your faith, go to God, go to him in prayer and ask him to reveal himself, and he will. That's a promise that he's made. And this kind of evidence helps, but there has been countless millions of Christians

who never heard the name of Josephus, who believed the gospel. So that's not required for faith. It's helpful, I think, but it's not required. So pray, seek God, assess your own heart. The gospel calls us to repent of our sins and ask yourself if you really want to do that. For many people, that is the ultimate stumbling block, our own pride, our own yearning for control in our lives to be our own guides. And just cast yourself before God and He will lift you up. Well, that's very helpful, counsel, and encouraging for folks to remember that there's a personal dimension to all of this.

If God is real, and if Jesus did rise from the dead, then he is the kind of God who will be responsive to faith and to prayer. And so that's a good encouragement. And as we finish, of course, I want to make sure that any viewers watching this will know what that gospel message is. And so I'd like to just share that's the message that the God who created this world, created each of us, us in his image, has sent Jesus as a way to restore us to himself from our sin and our rebellion against God, and that we can access that by simple faith, by simply surrendering our life to Christ and inviting his forgiveness and love into our life and then following him. So, and I love your pastoral comments there, that the way we get to peace about that isn't

by reading one more book or having one more insight. It is a more existential thing. Okay, my last question for you is to have you help me find a good title for this video because I don't want to do a sensationalistic title, but I do want to have a title that is appropriately signaling to people on YouTube, and that will help people find the video about what really we're talking about that will help them get an accurate sense. So a rough draft general idea of something in the ballpark would be something like groundbreaking book, proves testimony of Jesus outside the Bible. Now that's a little bit, you know, both, especially if you put the word groundbreaking and all caps. It's a mouthful, yeah. We need to shorten that.

How would you summarize if we're trying to just get a brief synopsis here? Help me think about that. You could say new evidence for Jesus. That's one simple way to do it, because it is evidence, and even if you disagree with what it means, it's still evidence. But of course, I think that it is remarkable evidence. I am going with that, and if anybody complains in the comments, we'll know they didn't make it to the end of the video.

So, all right, Tom, thank you very much for your outstanding work. It's a joy to get to know you a little bit. God bless you. And I would like to say to all our viewers, check the video description to read this book and share about it and look into this more. It's really exciting stuff. So thanks for watching, everybody, and we'll see you in the next video.