Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Here is their conclusion on that one paragraph about Jesus:
Opinion on the authenticity of this passage is varied. Louis H. Feldman surveyed the relevant literature from 1937 to 1980 in Josephus and Modern Scholarship. Feldman noted that 4 scholars regarded the Testimonium Flavianum as entirely genuine, 6 as mostly genuine, 20 accept it with some interpolations, 9 with several interpolations, and 13 regard it as being totally an interpolation.
It is impossible that this passage is entirely genuine. It is highly unlikely that Josephus, a believing Jew working under Romans, would have written, "He was the Messiah." This would make him suspect of treason, but nowhere else is there an indication that he was a Christian. Indeed, in Wars of the Jews, Josephus declares that Vespasian fulfilled the messianic oracles. Furthermore, Origen, writing about a century before Eusebius, says twice that Josephus "did not believe in Jesus as the Christ."
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I'm not a Biblical scholar but this paragraph is a prime example of how so much of what passes as 'academic' study of events and people that are two thousand years old is horeshit. None of the books written in Antiquity that we have today are original copies, they are centuries older and in most cases MANY centuries older so you could take anything written in any of them as 'suspect'.
Josephus was a Jew who became a Roman lackey, he became known as the Jewish 'Benedict Arnold', a traitor who during the Jewish revolt against the Romans saved his own ass while trapped in a cave with 40 men under his command who all died by killing each other rather than surrendering to the Romans. After that he spent the rest of his life writing about Jewish history.
That Testomonium Flavianum has been turned upside down and inside out a thousand different ways, there is wide acceptance that Josephus does refer to Jesus in it, not some other Jesus, in some translations Josephus refers to him as 'Jesus, the so called Christ', which as a Jewish non-believer in Jesus as the Messiah would make sense using the adjective 'so called'. Scholars also widely believe that later on Christians edited/added wording to make sure it was clear that the Jesus described was the Jesus they believe was the Messiah.
IF that's true that there were Christian writers who redacted Josephus' work to support their own beliefs it raises another question - why didn't they do a better and more thorough job of it? They easily could have added and embellished a lot more than they did. From my reading of all the arguments plus the history it looks to me like they were just trying to clarify that the Jesus mentioned was their Jesus not some random other guy named Jesus.
The best supporting evidence provided by Josephus for the historical fact of Jesus as a real person comes via John the Baptist whom Josephus also wrote about and there is little to no argument from the major scholars that casts doubt on his writings about John the Baptist, one of the central figures in the life of Jesus.
The idea that a man named Jesus from whom the religion of Christianity sprung from never existed is far more irrational and without evidence than that he did exist. The Jewish world of that time was filled with Messianic wannabe cult leaders, they all had their followings, there were many different sects of Jews fighting amongst themselves. There was no need to make up a Jesus character, he and others like him existed. He had a huge impact on his followers and after his death they went out and preached what Jesus taught them. Later on they wrote the gospels, and like all religious scripture they wrote about Jesus and his times metaphorically creating the myths we are all familiar with in the New Testament. Not even the Pope takes what's written in the Bible as literal history.
Now Moses, there's a guy for whom there is real serious doubt whether he ever existed, he pre-dates Jesus by almost 1,500 years, at a time when there is no written history at all, it's doubtful the Jews at that time even had a written language. It's possible that generation after generation of Israelites passed down stories about a great leader named Moses - it's also possible that whoever wrote the Old Testament just made it all up out of his/their imagination.