In the first-century, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote a description of Jesus. He did so by paraphrasing an early Christian text, and this source we have available to us as it was also used in the Gospel of Luke. This paraphrase model is the best explanation for the origins of Josephus’s Jesus passage, according to the analysis in a recent research article, “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum“, outlined in my previous post. The open access journal article is available here (Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus: Volume 20, Issue 1). In the present post, I expand on the article with a convenient color-coded summary that displays the paraphrase evidence at a glance. I also  elaborate on the difference between this and earlier proposals and discuss some of the implications for the dating of the gospels and the nature of early relations between Christians and Jews.

Breaking Away

It is natural to be skeptical of yet another article on this very old problem. Over the past 400 years there have been many investigations into Josephus’s Jesus passage, which during that time came to be known as the Testimonium Flavianum, and yet all of this inquiry has not achieved a consensus agreement among scholars about the passage’s authenticity and interpretation. A summary of the controversy can be found in “The Historical Jesus” by Gerd Thiessen and Annette Merz (or see Wikipedia, “Josephus on Jesus“). Almost everyone who has looked at the Testimonium Flavianum has some opinion about it. This multitude of opinions has led to a resigned skepticism: that the Testimonium has been so tampered with it is impossible to untangle what, if anything, was originally written by Josephus and what has been inserted by a later Christian. A resolution has seemed impossible. So what makes this latest research different?

As the primary difference, the new research does not study the passage on its own. This research instead uses a type of comparative analysis that is familiar to Josephus scholars but which has been unknown to most researchers of the Testimonium. Most Bible scholars are familiar with identifying dependence between Gospel texts through simply identifying verbatim agreement. In this way, one can clearly see how many passages of Mark, Matthew and Luke can be convincingly argued to have some form of dependence among them. But these scholars were not as familiar with dealing with the paraphrase method that Josephus employs, which substitutes words and phrases of his own preference for the analogous ones in his source, along with making clarifications, elaborations and simplifications. So they did not have the tools to ask whether or not the Testimonium could plausibly be a paraphrase of a candidate Christian source.

Thus, past researchers used a poor model of Josephus’s compositional method. Thinking Josephus was writing more or less spontaneously and personally about what he knew of Christians, rather than recognizing that his major goal was for his works to become a reliable reference for those interested in history. In his works, he tells his readers several times how they can trust that he, unlike many of his contemporaries, stayed close to authenticated sources. Most of his Jewish Antiquities is made of paraphrases of respected historical sources. Following that basic technique, his writings on Christians should first of all be expected to primarily be a paraphrase of some reliable document about the history of Christian origins. But Testimonium researchers did not use this model of writing, and this is the reason—I would say the only reason—why they considered the Testimonium to be a puzzle. For these incorrect models did not fit the text before them, which seems both too Christian in structure to be an independent creation by a Jewish historian, and yet is not pious enough to be wholly written by a Christian. That model of free composition cannot explain why apparently Christian creedal statements are written with vocabulary characteristic of Josephus. By contrast, the paraphrase model of composition does fit the Testimonium text. This makes the paraphrase model of Testimonium composition both natural and powerful. Moreover, it is particularly simple compared to all other explanations: the new model does not need to invent unknown editors or forgers, or create other contortions, in order to account for the plain text before us.

Compounding the incorrect writing model, past researchers imposed presuppositions about the gospels or Jewish and Christian relations of the time (the late first century) and allowed these to guide their evaluation of the text. These should be set aside, as the paraphrase investigation is a standalone technical study, that rises or falls on one’s judgment of the textual evidence and the comparative power, naturalness and simplicity of the argument versus the alternatives. 

Setting Aside Non-textual Arguments

To evaluate the paraphrase argument based purely on its analysis of the words themselves, one should set aside convictions and preferences about dates of gospels, fiction vs history, historicity of Jesus. The paraphrase argument does not assume Jesus was a historical figure, that the gospels are accurate, or that Luke finished his work before Josephus and Josephus read Luke’s gospel. If the paraphrase argument is then judged favorably on its own terms then it will inform the answers to these questions, rather than vice versa. This is addressed below, in the section “Revisiting the Dating of the Gospels”.

Also, presuppositions about Josephus’s attitude towards Jesus are not involved in the analysis. So statements such as these should be set aside: “Josephus would have considered Jesus a false messiah and would have disparaged him as he did other pretenders of the time.” “Josephus would at best have written a neutral account that would not leave a positive impression about Jesus or Christians.” Rather, our best evidence of Josephus’s own attitude towards Christians could be derived from studying the way he paraphrased the Testimonium. This is addressed below, in the section “Revisiting First-Century Relations between Jews and Christians.”

Re-reading the Testimonium Flavianum as a Josephus Paraphrase

Let us now read the Testimonium with this setting in mind: that while Josephus was writing the Antiquities, in 80–94 CE, he decided to write something about the origins of the Christian group under Pilate for the benefit of his Roman audience; and he set about it in the same way as the rest of the Antiquities: he found what he considered to be a reliable historical source—evidently one that came from the Christian community itself—and paraphrased it. What follows is a more literal than usual translation of the Testimonium, allowing some awkward English in favor of preserving word order and case. As you read it, I ask you keep in mind the idea of a paraphrase by Josephus of a Christian document. This is Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64 [Book 18 Ch. 3 Par. 3]:

This is quite a compressed statement. There is little elaboration of curious events. In light of the paraphrase concept, one can feel that Josephus has endeavored to constrain himself to the narrow focus of the source document before him. Some apparently questionable phrases become clearer when we look at the source the he was drawing from.

In the article “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum“, the source text is identified to be very similar if not identical to the text found in Luke 24:18–27, depicting the Easter encounter on the road to Emmaus. The article finds thirty-one correspondences, in content and mostly in parallel order, between the Testimonium and the Lukan text. This is far higher than the number that can be found between other Jesus descriptions, such as the speeches in Acts or the Nicene Creed.

Can the reader find all thirty-one of these ordered correspondences by comparing these texts? (Click on Luke 24:18–27 to compare with the above.) These may not be obvious, because of Josephus’s aforementioned habit of altering words and phrases. He makes these revisions either to suit his own preferences and goals or simply to avoid seeming to be a mere copyist of others’ work. But as shown in the article, most of these alterations have precedents in other passages of Josephus when compared to their known sources.

The following shows Luke 24:18—27 with the highlighting of phrases that correspond to the Testimonium. The different colors indicate the paraphrase technique that connects a phrase to the Testimonium. The color coding method is described after the text.

The color coding of the highlights indicates the technique of paraphrase as supported by examples from Josephus’s works. This paraphrase evidence is an extra dimension of connectedness beyond content and order.

Green highlights a word whose root is shared with the Testimonium in the parallel context and which Josephus can be shown to borrow also in other paraphrase. This reflects the fact that in his writings Josephus will reuse some words from his source material but change to a cognate (some word root) or alter the inflection to suit the sentence structure. For example, “deed” in the Luke passage reappears as “deeds” in the Testimonium, and another example of the borrowing of the root “deed” (Greek ergon) is when it was lifted from the Letter of Aristeas 81 for use in Antiquities 12.84. Each of the green highlighted words above has similar examples in Josephus’s writings where he has borrowed that word from his source. Details of each, and of the words highlighted in other colors, can be found in the journal article. I’ll point out that with “the Christ” one can see Josephus’s habit of copying the definite article when used with a name when they appear together in his sources; this supports the often-proposed reading of the Testimonium as referring to the name Christos (whom Josephus’s readers knew as the founder of the Christians) rather than the title “the Christ” (as discussed in the article).

Blue identifies a word or phrase with a substitution in the Testimonium that is paralleled elsewhere in Josephus’s paraphrase work. For example, the expression used by Luke, “in these days” (en tais hemerais tautais), is substituted in the Testimonium by “about that time” (kata touton ton chronon), and a similar substitution was made—to give just one example—when Josephus paraphrased 1 Maccabees 2.1 in writing Antiquities 12.265. The other expression pairs with this kind of evidence are, in Luke/Testimonium order: “deed before the people”/”surprising”; “powerful in word”/”teacher”; “all”/”many & many”; “chief priests and leaders”/”principal men”; “said to them”/”appeared to them”; “told”/”told” (different but synonymous Greek verbs); “all”/”countless”.

Amber indicates a substitution that is only partially substantiated in Josephus’s paraphrase work. For example, “brings” or “passes” (agei) in Luke’s “brings this third day” is replaced in the Testimonium with “having” (echon). There are corresponding examples where Josephus’s source denotes the passage of time with some verb, and Josephus replaces that verb with a form of “to have”. One example is 2 Samuel 1.1, “stayed two days”, which in the Septuagint uses the verb ekathiseis, and Josephus in his revision for Antiquities 7.1 substitutes “having” (echontos). So structurally this verb replacement is known as a paraphrase techniques. But more specifically, there is no case found where the substituted verb is “bring” as in Luke. Yet, as Josephus does make use of both “bring” and “have” (agei and echon) at various times to indicate the passage of time, he regarded these as more or less synonymous in that context. So it would be in character if he substituted one for the other, although an explicit case of is lacking. Other substitutions with partial support are “prophet”/”wise”; “powerful in deed”/”doer”; “word before God”/”truth”; “people”/”people & Judaeans & Greeks”; “delivered”/”indictment”; “we were hoping that he”/”those first loving [him]”; “glory”/”wonders”.

Red is a phrase which corresponds to a Testimonium phrase but the replacement does not have parallels elsewhere in the works. The one clear case is Luke’s “judgment of death” which is paralleled, in meaning and location, by the Testimonium’s “condemned”. The latter word is found with regard to punishment is found only twice in Josephus’s texts where sources are known, and neither of these revise a source “judgment of death”.

Gray is a phrase which Josephus omits from the Testimonium and for which there are parallels for his omitting such a phrase from his sources. The most interesting example is “the one about to redeem Israel”. The nearly identical wording (in Greek) is found in 1 Maccabees 4:11, in the speech of Judah Maccabee before the battle of Emmaus. Luke appears to be making a reference to this speech here, especially considering that Luke places his statement also on the way to Emmaus. Josephus paraphrases the Maccabees passage in writing Antiquities 12.307, and although he conveys most of Judah’s speech he omits that statement. This is precedent for his making the same omission in revising the Luke-like source. The plausible reason is that in both cases Josephus did not want to remind his Roman readership that some Judeans had thought their resistance to foreign occupation was divinely approved and foretold.

Unhighlighted. Parts that are not highlighted do not appear in the Testimonium, although they may be represented in a compressed form. Note that these are primarily the the dramatic framework of the Emmaus encounter and the women at the tomb. A plausible reading is that Josephus wasn’t interested in the evangelizing drama and only extracted the impersonal historical facts about Jesus; the encounter still appears in the narrative as the third day appearance to the followers. But an alternate theory is that the dramatization was not in Josephus’s source, but that Luke expanded that source by adding vividness in order to write his version. 

Note also there are additions or expansions the Testimonium makes that are not in Luke’s text. Examples of the same types of expansions can also be found in Josephus’s works.

Taken together, the highlighting shows at a glance that the Testimonium has the attributes of a Josephan paraphrase of the Lukan (or very similar) text. This appearance of paraphrase is not an easy status for a text to obtain. For example, Josephus’s description of John the Baptist can not be a paraphrase of any of the New Testament descriptions of John (see Antiquities 18.116–119 [Book 18 Ch. 5 Par. 2]). Moreover, the Testimonium cannot be a paraphrase of any other ancient description of Jesus to the degree seen in this passage from Luke.

The proposals that the Testimonium was a forgery or that it was significantly edited provide no basis to expect this observed resemblance to a Josephan paraphrase of a text like Luke’s. Nor do those proposals have a plausible explanation for this resemblance. Their only possible recourse, that this is coincidence, fails statistical tests. (See the article for more details of the arguments from coincidence; I will also post on this in the future on this site.)

In short, the paraphrase model is well supported by Josephus’s own writings compared to his sources. Furthermore, unlike other proposals, it is in agreement with the manuscript tradition showing the Testimonium has not undergone deliberate editing. It is natural, as it matches what is expected from Josephus’s known writing methods. It is simple, requiring no other authors. And it is powerful, as it explains the puzzles of the Testimonium and sheds light on historical questions; some of these points I will now consider.

Re-Reading the Most Controversial Statements

The paraphrase model leads to reading the most controversial statements of the Testimonium in a new light. The fact that bears a resemblance to Christian creeds is now easily understood. After Josephus removed from his source as much evangelical, dramatic and supernatural material as he can, what remains is still the structure of the “Lukan kerygma” that became a foundation pillar for the later Christian creeds.

Certain statements glare like red beacons to modern Christian readers who read them as uniquely creedal beliefs: whether Jesus should be called a man, that he was Christos, that he appeared to his followers as living again. But Josephus was not writing in a Christian-dominated world where these statements had extraordinary meaning. Rather, he was writing for a non-Christian Roman audience of the first century. Romans were familiar with the idea that certain teachers (such as Pythagoras) were divine, that the founder of the group named “Christians” was one Christos, and that people experience post-mortem appearances of their loved ones. These statements could all be asserted as matters of historical fact. In this light, when Josephus found these concepts in his source, he had no strong reason to exclude them from his paraphrase. In fact, omitting them would have been irresponsible of him, for he would be eliminating the key events in the formation of the the Christian group.

As an example, the Testimonium says Jesus was ho Christos, in Greek, which has the definite article and so is almost automatically translated as “the Christ”. But the definite article is frequently used with Greek proper names—half the instances of “Jesus” in the gospels use the definite article, “the Jesus” (ho Iesus). So it has been long pointed out (since William Whiston in the 18th century) that we cannot conclude that Josephus meant ho Christos to mean just the name, Christos, which Roman writers (such as Tacitus, twenty or thirty years later) also used as simply the name of the Christian founder. Now the paraphrase model adds support to this idea: the Luke extract also employs the definite article, and it is known that when Josephus’s source uses the definite article with a name he almost always copies that usage. More analysis of this (including his other paraphrases where a source has christos) and of the other controversial key terms is found in the journal article.

Josephus’s hardest task was to explain to his Roman audience why a group of followers survived the death of Jesus, as the key points—wonder-working, debatable divine status, post-mortem appearance—were not unique among Roman tales of extraordinary people. If some of the followers experienced an appearance of Jesus for a brief time after his death, why would that have created a group that had persisted for sixty years—the time from Jesus to the writing of the Antiquities—when few if any of the original followers could still be alive? The Lukan text affords Josephus an answer to this question, for the followers understood these events in the context of scriptural prophecies. It is this combination that gave the group persistence. Perhaps this is why Josephus chose this account for his source—it provided an answer to the main question his readers would have. He did not add anything of his own to explain how the group could have attracted new members who never saw Jesus.

Thus, Luke’s Emmaus text and Josephus’s Testimonium perform the same historical function of describing the transition from the earliest Judea experiences of Jesus to their reinterpretation through the use of the scriptures. This developmental arc, that moment of realization that turns stymied followers into a new belief community, binds together the two texts—and at the same time, this tale of transition is notably missing from almost any other brief ancient description of Jesus and the early followers.

Modern readers who find the Testimonium’s “Christian” statements as too impossible for Josephus to write are reading them in the context of a large and powerful church, while both Josephus and Luke present them as simple historical facts to which prophetic interpretations have been later added by a very small group. Then the supposedly controversial statements support the Testimonium having been composed at a time when when Josephus did not perceive the Christian group as having much power, so that the group’s claims did not have to be finely parsed or disputed.

Revisiting the Dating of the Gospels

There are scholarly opinions that the book of Luke-Acts was composed in the second century. One of the arguments that Luke-Acts must have been written after 100 CE is that it appears to show some dependence on Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, which was published in 93/94 CE; for example, see the analysis by Steve Mason in Josephus and the New Testament (Chap. 6). The paraphrase model suggests a dependence the other way, where Josephus revises a text that appears in Luke. (Its evidence cannot be reconciled with the idea of Luke basing his passage on the Testimonium; see the article for this reasoning). Even so, Josephus’s dependence on a text like Luke’s for the Testimonium does not necessarily contradict a second-century completion for Luke-Acts, but it does refine the composition to a narrower date range.

If Luke drew information from Josephus’s Antiquities, he did so in a sketchy and error-prone way. He read events out of context and misplaced their timing, perhaps confusing persons of similar names. It seems he was working from partial notes, perhaps taken during public readings by Josephus (as H. St. James Thackeray suggested a century ago) or obtained secondhand, rather than from a written copy of the finished work. It is then possible Luke was working at the same time as Josephus and had access to something of the latter’s work in progress—readings of preliminary drafts, or summary excerpts passed through a social network—prior to the final version of the Antiquities.

On the other hand, the paraphrase model implies Josephus had some sort of contact with historians of the Christian, or Jewish-Christian, community in Rome. He must have had this contact in order to obtain either an excerpt of Luke’s gospel or an earlier document from Luke’s “special source”. (Luke’s “special source” is a collection of stories not found in the other gospels, and includes the Emmaus narrative). One notes that Josephus wrote the Antiquities over the period of about 80 CE to 93 CE, and at any time during this period he could have had contact with Christians who provided him the Testimonium source. If he wrote the Antiquities books in order he probably worked on Book 18, containing the Testimonium, in about 90 CE. Since Luke’s proposed dependence on Josephus is through Books 18 to 20 of the Antiquities, a possible scenario is that Luke and Josephus were working on their projects at the same time and had an exchange of information in 90 to 93 CE. This exchange may have been a cordial academic exchange, but apparently not a very close one, in which Josephus obtained the Testimonium source from Luke or his circle, and in return Josephus sent along excerpts from the draft of his work in progress that would be helpful to Luke in his work.

This dating reconciles the evidence from Luke with that of the paraphrase model. This does not say when the entirety of Luke-Acts was completed, which could have been much later. But it does give a window into a moment in time in the writing of the Gospels that has previously been unavailable.

Revisiting First-Century Relations between Jews and Christians

If we take the paraphrase model as the best explanation for the Testimonium, we can make some plausible deductions about Josephus’s interactions with (Jewish-)Christians in Rome and his public attitude toward them. His use of a Christian, or Jewish-Christian, document shows he had some social connection with them, but not a very close one, to judge from the fact he chose a very brief, minimal document, rather than trying to summarize an entire gospel or lengthy tract. One infers he wants to maintain cordial relations with one or more of the members of the group, for as he expands on his source he depicts the followers of Jesus as “people who received truth with pleasure”—literal philosophers—and he conveys from his source their virtues of loyalty to their teacher and piety toward the scriptures. This suggests Josephus had at least a friend, or perhaps wealthy supporter, among the group.

He does not add to his source any discussion of uniquely Christian beliefs, which suggests he simply does not want to enter into a public debate about them—or that he understands them little. In one of his changes to his source, there is a hint that he is aware of disagreements among (Jewish-)Christians of his time about the nature of Jesus—a wise man, or a prophet and so endowed with the divine spirit, or even something higher: he reduces the source “prophet man” to “wise man”, but then modifies his change by acknowledging that some have a different opinion of Jesus (“if one ought to call him a man”). Josephus does not indicate awareness of a debate about whether Christians should obey the Laws of Moses, although perhaps his elaboration of Jesus’s followers as including both Jews and “Greeks” indicates knowledge of a mixture of traditions in the group.

This perspective that Josephus, a prominent Jewish scholar, could be publicly cordial and event open-minded towards Christians is contrary to a common opinion that Jews were unrelievedly hostile towards Christians in the late first century. But, outside of the New Testament, historical evidence concerning Jewish attitudes towards Christians of the time is all but absent; the Testimonium, interpreted as a paraphrase, is the first document that can be dated and interpreted to provide information on these relations.

The implication that Josephus had an open attitude toward Christians has an interesting parallel in the character of the Trypho in Justin Martyr’s Conversations with Trypho, written some fifty years after the Antiquities. Trypho is depicted as an intellectually curious Jewish man who is open to series of cordial conversations with a Christian, Justin. No mere straw man, Trypho asks hard questions, likely the kind that Christians indeed encountered at the time, and is ultimately unconvinced by Justin’s arguments. Comparing to the Testimonium, it is notable that after each of Trypho’s simple questions he endures an extremely long torrent of scripture quotes that Justin argues are prophecies about Jesus. The Testimonium indicates Josephus himself may have had the same experience in conversing with Christians, for the Testimonium remarks how, from the point of view of the followers of Jesus, the scriptures had prophesied his resurrection and “countless other wonders about him.” While this statement is a valid representation of his source (“all that the prophets foretold”, “from Moses and all the prophets he interpreted all the Scriptures about himself”), Josephus’s phrasing adds something that can be read as a sense of bemusement as to the massive amount of scriptural argumentation that he, like the later Trypho, encountered in talks with members of the Christian community.

In future posts, I will discuss further how preconceptions about Jews and Christians in the first century influenced the arguments surrounding the Testimonium, and how the paraphrase model answers the most frequently asked questions about this unique and valuable passage. (You can sign up to be notified of future posts using the box at the top right of this page.)

Selected Bibliography

Gary J. Goldberg, Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus: Volume 20, Issue 1 (Feb 2022)

Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times (Studies in Biblical Literature 36; New York: Peter Lang, 2003)

Gerd Thiessen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Fortress Press, 1998)

Timothy J. Horner, Listening to Trypho: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue Reconsidered (Peeters, 2001)