There is a famous and controversial account of Jesus in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, a work published in 93/94 CE, about sixty years after the time of Jesus. If authentic, it constitutes the oldest historical record of Jesus outside the New Testament. It provides valuable evidence by Josephus, a Jewish writer born in Jerusalem in 37 or 38 CE, about the validity of the basic facts given in the New Testament about Jesus and his followers.

But for centuries it has been argued that this account was not in fact written by Josephus, but is rather a later forgery by pious Christian scribes. It is thought that the account sounds too positive to have been written by a Jewish historian of the time, who by assumption would be antagonistic toward Christians. To modern eyes, the strangely brief passage seems to be a declaration of key tenets of Christian faith similar to the creeds of the Church, which Josephus could not have affirmed. Yet this is a problem, as studies have shown it does appear to have been composed in Josephus’s literary style, leading many to consider that some original passage by Josephus has been heavily edited by later Christians rather than forged outright. Because of the opposing evidence on the question, a common opinion currently has been that the passage has been too tampered with to sort out its origins, resulting in a mystery that cannot be resolved. However, a new approach brings a large amount of surprising evidence to the problem.

A Simple and Natural Solution

In a new article in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, I present extensive evidence for a new model that provides a simple and natural explanation of the composition of the Jesus passage. The new explanation accounts for all of the elements that have been seen as puzzling and controversial.

This explanation makes use of the copious research investigators of Josephus have made on his methods of composition used throughout his Jewish Antiquities. Researchers have shown that the Antiquities is largely a book of paraphrases. Josephus often takes a known source, particularly the Bible, and follows it carefully while recasting its language and making selective changes to make it more suitable for non-Jewish readers in the Roman Empire. My article proposes that Josephus followed the same procedure in writing about Jesus. In keeping with his procedures, Josephus found a credible documentary source on Jesus and then applied his typical paraphrase techniques in order to incorporate it into his Antiquities. The article proposes that his source was a Christian account very much like, or even identical to, the Emmaus “Easter” narrative of Luke 24:18–27. 

The Paraphrase Model

 In a phrase-by-phrase study, this article finds that the Jesus account can be derived from Luke’s Emmaus narrative using transformations Josephus is demonstrated to have employed in paraphrasing known sources for the Antiquities. The study finds these paraphrase precedents in word adoption, word and phrase substitution, content order preservation and content modification. In short, the Jesus passage that appears in the Antiquities is not an anomaly at all, but is just what would be expected if Josephus composed it using the same methods he did for almost everything else, by taking a reliable source and converting it using his characteristic methods.

Not only can the passage be a paraphrase by Josephus, but the article also shows how no explanation by coincidence, editing or forgery can plausibly explain both the structure of the passage in itself and this peculiar relationship between the Antiquities account and Luke’s Emmaus narrative.

This “paraphrase model” then accounts for the aspects of the Jesus account that have puzzled past researchers, particularly the fact that it seems to be a combination of Christian and Josephan elements. That combination had led many to suspect some original Josephus passage had been edited by a later Christian. The paraphrase model reverses the order of events: an original Christian document was later edited by Josephus and included in the Antiquities.

Historical Implications

An implication of this result is that Josephus judged that the Christian document did indeed reflect the historical events regarding Jesus. Otherwise, he would not have used it in his history, as he staked his reputation on the reliability of his work. He could not have used the document if he had never heard of these extraordinary events, or the continuation of Jesus followers, when Josephus was living in Jerusalem in the 30’s to the 60’s CE. Josephus’s account of Jesus thus gives historical credibility to the basic story of Jesus and dates the origin of the Emmaus passage in the Gospel of Luke to before 93 CE. The use of the source also indicates that Josephus had cordial enough contacts with the Christian community in Rome to give a fair rendition of one of their historical sources, contrary to the opinion of some that Jewish-Christian relations of the time were unrelentingly hostile.

Read the Published Article Free in Open Access

The article is “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum” by Gary J. Goldberg, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus: Volume 20, Issue 1 (Feb 2022). It is published as Open Access and available here for download: Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum (PDF). An online version can be read here.

I am working on a version of this article for the general reader and will soon post it on this website. I will also make a series of posts showing how the single hypothesis of a Josephan paraphrase easily resolves the hardest questions about the Jesus account that have raised so many doubts about its authenticity. If you want to be notified of these posts as they are made, please add your email address to the notifications list using the “Sign Up” box.