Jesus Melchizedek Society

The problem is obvious. Josephus was a devout Jew. He would never have written he was the Christ. That would be admitting Jesus was the Messiah. He would never have stated the resurrection as fact. He would never have questioned whether Jesus was human.

So what happened? The dominant theory today is partial interpolation. Josephus wrote something about Jesus, probably neutral or slightly negative. Medieval Christian copists in transmitting the text added the most enthusiastic lines. If indeed one ought to call him a man, he was the Christ, the reference to the resurrection.

Evidence supports this theory. An Arabic version of the text discovered in 1971 says he was perhaps the Messiah. More plausible for a Jewish author. A 12th century Syriak version says he was believed to be the Christ. Also more neutral.

In 2025, the scholar TC Schmidt published a bombshell book with Oxford University Press using computational stylistic analysis comparing linguistic patterns in the testimonium with Josephus’s other works. Schmidt argues the passage is substantially authentic. The supposed interpolations are smaller than previously thought.

The debate continues. It will probably never be definitively resolved. But one thing is certain without Josephus we would have no mention of Jesus in non-Christian first century sources none. Tacitus mentions Christ briefly but he wrote decades later ply the younger mentions Christians not Jesus directly is ambiguous. Josephus is the only external witness contemporary or nearly contemporary to the world in which Jesus lived.

His third important work was “Against Apion”, a defense of Judaism against anti-semitic attacks. Apion was an Alexandrian grammarian who spread slanders against the Jews. He claimed they worshiped a donkey’s head in the temple, that they kidnapped Greeks, fattened them for a year, and sacrificed them, eating their entrails, that they were misanthropes who hated all mankind.

Antisemitism is not a modern invention. It was already virulent in the ancient world.

Josephus dismantled each accusation systematically. He cited dozens of Greek and Roman authors as witnesses to Jewish antiquity and dignity. He presented the law of Moses as superior to Greek philosophy. He argued that Jews contributed positively to every society in which they lived.

“Against Apion” is little read today, but it contains some of the most eloquent defenses of Jewish identity ever written.

His final work was the autobiography, a personal defense against criticisms from another Jewish historian named Justice of Tiberius who accused him of having caused the revolt in Galilee.

Josephus died around AD 100. The exact date is unknown. Dissision was assassinated in 96 and with him ended the protection of the Flavian dynasty. Josephus likely did not survive long after that. He died in Rome, far from Jerusalem, far from the ruins of the temple, far from the land where he had been born.

The Jews ignored him for centuries. His name does not appear in the Talmud, the Midrash, or any rabbinic literature of antiquity. The silence was deliberate. He was erased from collective memory.

The Christians, ironically, preserved him. Josephus’s manuscripts survived because medieval monks copied them, interested in the passages about Jesus, John the Baptist, and the context of the New Testament. The church called him a near Christian. Some even called him a saint. Josephus would have found that funny or tragic or both.

2,000 years have passed. The temple remains in ruins. The western wall, a portion of the retaining wall Herod built, is all that remains. Jews from all over the world go there to weep over a loss that happened 20 centuries ago.

Rome fell. The empire fractured. The Flavians turned to dust. But Josephus’ books survived.

And this is where the story gets strange. The man his own countryman called a traitor became, against all odds, the greatest preserver of ancient Jewish memory.

Think about that. Without Josephus, we would know almost nothing about the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, the groups that shaped Judaism in the time of Jesus. We would not have detailed descriptions of Herod’s temple, its architecture, its rituals, its magnificence. We would not know the political backstage of Roman Judea, the intrigues, the corrupt governors, the crushed revolts.

Without Josephus, Masada would be just a rock in the desert. Herod would be just a name. The great revolt would be a footnote.

And without Josephus, the debate over the historical Jesus would look completely different. When scholars try to reconstruct the world in which Jesus lived, the synagogues of Galilee, the tensions with Rome, the messianic expectations, the conflicts among Jewish sects, they open Josephus. There is no alternative.

When Christian apologists want to prove Jesus existed outside the Gospels, they cite Josephus. It is exhibit number one. When skeptics want to challenge that evidence, they also argue over Josephus. The Testimonium Flavanum is the battlefield.