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S5E5 The Gospel According to Josephus: On the Final Days of Jesus Christ with Thomas C. Schmidt
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Welcome to the new books network.
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Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. I'm your host, Ryan Schinkel. This episode is a second part of a two part series on the Gospel according to Josephus. Please see our catalog for last week's installment. Today, as we continue season five, I have with us as our guest, Professor Thomas C. Schmidt. Professor Schmidt, welcome to Madison's Notes. So Josephus is writing contemporaneous pretty much as the Gospels being formed. Right. And so he would be drawing from a different but adjacent group of eyewitnesses according to your interpretation. Now let's specifically dig into the text a little bit. So you have an initial translation of Jewish Antiquities 18.63. Can you read? Not the Greek, of course, although you're welcome to. I welcome extemporaneous readings of ancient Greek. Feel free to do so. But also please do include the English.
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All right. This is From Josephus, Antiquities 18.63. 64. And this is how the passage is typically translated by scholars. We'll talk about whether we think it's a good translation or not in a moment. But it goes like and in this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was a doer of miraculous deeds, a teacher of men who received truth with pleasure, and he led many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who had first loved him did not cease to do so, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day. Given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And up till now, the tribe of the Christians who were named from him has not disappeared.
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And a couple pages later, helpfully put in your introduction, you have what you think is the correct translation.
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Yes. And so a bit of background is that scholars traditionally have been very skeptical and suspicious about this passage because there are claims in the passage that seem so fabulously pro Christian. They seem impossible to come from a non Christian Jew like Josephus. In the passage that I just read, Jesus is called the Christ. He is implied that he's divine. He's said to have risen from the dead. He is said to have fulfilled Jewish prophecy. He works wonders. All those kinds of things. All of this is improbable coming from a non Christian. Some of it is impossible. You can't be a non Christian Jew and say that Jesus actually was the Christ. That's the definition of being a Christian. So traditionally, scholars have thought that even though this passage is in all our manuscripts of the antiquities, they have believed that some ancient Christian scribe tampered with the passage and changed it. And some scholars think the whole thing was revamped or inserted by a Christian whole cloth. The majority think that Josephus said something like this paragraph, but it was doctored and gussied up to become much more pro Christian. In my book I investigate this, and for various reasons that we can get into, I think the passage is being mistranslated by scholars. I think that the Greek is not being understood properly. And when properly understood, those objections to the content fall away. And the passage actually sounds much like what a first century non Christian Jew would have said about Jesus. And here's the new translation that I offer in my book. And in this time there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who received truisms with pleasure. And he brought over many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was thought to be the Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who at first were devoted to him did not cease to be so. For on the third day it seemed to them that he was alive again, given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And up till now, the tribe of the Christians who were named from him has not disappeared.
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And then finally, the one mention that we get later in Antiquities has to do with. It's very briefly about how James, who is James the just who for context would have been the bishop of Jerusalem at the time, was being brought before the Sanhedrin because he was going to be stoned, along with possibly other Christians. And he is one of the early martyrs of the church. And it mentions James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ.
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Precisely.
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Okay, that's the second mention which is uncontroversial.
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Yes, Josephus mentions Jesus one other time. It's an aside. He's talking about the Jewish high priest Ananus ii. He's trying to explain why Ananus was removed from the high priesthood by the Romans. And he says it was because he illegally gathered a Sanhedrin and dragged this guy James forward as a lawbreaker and had him stoned to death. But then James is only mentioned as an aside to explain why Ananus was removed from the high priesthood. But when he mentions James, he then needs to mention another aside. He has to mention who James was. And he says, well, he was the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ.
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And it's that phrasing who was called the Christ is just reporting this was the other name he was known by.
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Exactly.
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Josephus is not attributing anything to his identity through that or committing himself to anything by mentioning that. But in the first passage, what was its early reception in antiquity? How did people cite it or look at it? Tell me about specifically the nitty gritty, the manuscripts. Tell me about the whole textual analysis that you do in your book. And then tell me about the later modern reception to it and the critical opinions that developed around it.
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So much has been written on this passage. It excites scholars immensely because if it's authentic, it would be this fascinating window into Jesus. Regardless of what you think of Jesus, there's a fair claim to say he's the most influential person who ever lived.
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He led an extraordinary life. Say whatever you want. Agree or disagree.
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Exactly. So what I do in my book is I ask the question. All right, I want to investigate how we should read this passage. And one way to do that is to look at how ancient writers who spoke Greek natively, how they read the passage. So I draw from some very powerful Greek databases and I do exhaustive searches of Greek literature before the printing press to see who quotes this passage. And then what do they think of it, how do they interpret it, how do they comment on it? And there's about 20 instances where ancient and medieval writers will quote this passage. And in my first chapter, I go through these instances systematically and I show that they don't interpret the passage like you would expect. They very frequently do not get excited about all of these pro Christian claims, even though these are Christians themselves. Even though these pro Christian claims would have really helped their arguments, they're often making. Instead, they quote the passage in the same form we have today, the same wording. And instead of pointing out the messianic status of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, the fact that he fulfilled Jewish prophecy, the fact that he was raised from the dead. Instead of pointing out those things, they will point out the chronology of Jesus ministry according to the passage, they will point out the number of Jesus disciples, the nature of his teaching, Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus. If we only had one or two examples of an ancient or medieval Christian doing this, I don't think we could make much of it. But this forms a Pattern. We just find this again and again. In fact, a couple authors seem wary of the passage. They seem to think that this passage could be negative. It could be a negative statement about Jesus.
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Who would be some of these people? Would that be Jerome?
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One of them is the first person who quotes it in history, Eusebius of Caesarea from 311 A.D. he quotes the passage and he quotes it to establish the chronology of Jesus ministry. And he quotes it to establish the fact that Jesus had many disciples. I know that in this passage Josephus uses this particular Greek word paradoxa to describe the miracles of Jesus. And he says, I know some people might say that people can perform paradoxa by sorcery, but Jesus wasn't a sorcerer. And he gives arguments for why Jesus wasn't a sorcerer. What's interesting is that he knows that the Greek word behind our translation, miracles can have negative connotations.
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Signs. Right?
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No Greek has many words for miracles. One of them is semea signs, which is very positive. Another is Dunamis, again very positive powers wonders. Another is paradoxa, which I show in my book. It's hard to translate into English. Probably the best translation would be like paranormal deeds, something that is supernatural, but of unknown origin, potentially negative origin, occultic, or something potentially. And so Eusebius knows this. He knows that this word could be construed negatively. And we have a couple other examples of this too. So in my book, that's my first chapter and I say we really need to be asking ourselves if we're properly interpreting this passage.
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Okay, and how many famous people from the ancient world and from the Middle Ages quote it? Who would they be?
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Eusebius is the most famous. He actually quotes it three times.
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Origen mentions Josephus, mentions Josephus wasn't a Christian, but he doesn't cite it.
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Correct. Origen doesn't cite it. And actually that word paradoxa may be the reason why. Because when Origen quotes from Josephus, scholars have often said he's quoting from the antiquities Origen. He talks about Josephus talking about John the Baptist. He talks about Josephus talking about James, the brother of Jesus. Why wouldn't he mention this passage about Jesus? And the answer may be in the book that Origen is writing, he's opposing a vicious anti Christian writer. Which book is this against? Celsus. So he's writing against Celsus.
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Celsus. Everyone hates Celsus. He's a horrible guy, never picks up a tab, just really absconds with the money. It's just horrible.
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And Celsus is Accusing Jesus of all these terrible things. Celsus is writing around the year 170, we think. And one of the things he accuses Jesus of doing is performing Paradoxa by magic, by sorcery, Avada Kedavra, something like that. So for Origen to quote this passage where Josephus says, oh yeah, he did, Jesus did work, Paradoxa would completely defeat Origen's attempt to rehabilitate Jesus because that would just play into Celsus hands. So Origen does not quote the passage. Eusebius does. Jerome, the famous translator of the Vulgate the Bible into Latin. He quotes the passage. A name that may be unfamiliar, but should not be unfamiliar, if I had my way is Jacob of Edessa. He is a Syriac writer around the year 700. Arguably the most educated man in the world around 700. A famous linguist, philosopher, historian. He's writing in Syriac. He's writing in Edessa.
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He's been a contemporary of John Damas.
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Yes, an older contemporary, if I have my dates right. He also quotes the passage and translates it. I show that in my book. So there's eminent authorities. Rufinus, he's a very famous church historian writing in Latin America in the late three hundreds. He quotes from the passage as well. Cassiodorus, he's another crucial person in the history of Western thought. He quotes from the passage. So these are all names of people who discuss this passage, and they discuss
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it in a way one without attributing Christian identity to Josephus and without committing Josephus to. Committing himself to thinking that Jesus actually was the Messiah. And. But also, do they translate in a way that fits with your second version you gave of the passage?
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This is where it gets interesting. Some do the Arabic version, who, we don't know who translated that.
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Is this the one that was discovered in 1972?
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Yes, that does follow my understanding of it. When you look at Jacob of Edessa's version, that follows many of my interpretations, especially Jacob preserves the version. Instead of Jesus being said to be the Christ, he was the Christ, as the Greek manuscripts say. Jacob's version says he was thought to be the Christ. Jacob also the Arabic portrays the resurrection as something that the disciples reported or seemed to them to be the case. Cassiodorus, what's interesting with Cassiodorus is that his version is actually very pro Christian. His version follows the standard version of scholars. He borrows from Rufinus for this. What's interesting though, is Cassiodorus and his team translate the whole of the antiquities, all 300,000 words. And if you take those words and phrases in the Testimonium Flavianum and you look at how Cassiodorus translates those same words and phrases elsewhere, when Josephus mentions the same words and phrases elsewhere, then all of a sudden he doesn't translate them as positively. So it looks like even though Cassiodorus does this positive version, it looks like he's changing his method when he gets to this passage.
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Now, the modern reception, Windez's skepticism about this passage, according to Geza Vermesch, there are three views. One, this passage is entirely authentic. According to his famous article in 1987 said that this was a minority position. But then there is the view that this is entirely written by some Christian scribe that threw it in there and faked the text. And that is even a smaller minority position. But the majority position would be that there is an original Josephus text that some Syriac scholar or someone who was transmitting it added in things that were like footnotes or were little clarifications that weren't meant to be taken as the main text. But over time it got as it was transmitted text by text, was then taken as the main text. And so these two things were confused. And so what we have is currently in the standard version is a composite of these two things of Josephus text and the interpolations intended or unintended. Now, when did this modern skepticism that this is fake or there's a lot of fake elements in it start?
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There were some scholars that were thinking along those lines pre 1800s, but it really picks up during the age of modern biblical criticism, mid-1800s and so on. So that by the time you get to the early 1900s, it's by far the majority position and that this passage is not authentic. What's curious is you gave the state of play from the opinion of Gaza VERMESCH around the 70s and 80s, 1970s, 1980s, and that's correct. But if you go to the early 1900s, the majority of scholars thought that the whole passage was fake. It was entirely a fabrication. And the reason why that changed is fascinating in of itself because there was a very famous translator of Josephus, Henry Thackeray, who translated much of Josephus corpus for that Loeb Classical Library, the beautiful green volumes with Greek and text on one side and English on the other. And Henry Thackeray thought that this passage was totally fabricated by a Christian. However, for his translation project, he made dictionary, a thesaurus of Josephus's works to help him as he was translating. And he noticed that there were so many phrases in the testimony of Flavianum that Josephus uses elsewhere that look like Josephus, they sound like Josephus. And so in a famous essay he wrote in the 1920s, he said, I've changed my position. I can no longer say that this is a wholesale fabrication. Clearly, Josephus was responsible for much of this passage, and that changed the field.
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Scholars embrace that he's originally a convert. A voice crying out in the wilderness.
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Right? Yeah. Yes. And recently I wish I highlighted this in my book a bit more, including my book, which came out in 2025. There have been three books on the testimony in Flavianum by scholars published in this century in the past 25 years, and all three of them argue for effectively complete authenticity of the passage and the reception of my book. It's still early days, but there's been four or five academic reviews that have come out. I've done several book talks, but it looks like the position might be changing again, that scholars are moving closer and closer towards complete authenticity, or complete authenticity with maybe a word or two that had been dropped out or switched.
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The really controversial Greek in the Testimonium Flavianum is he was called the Christ. What is the Greek? How does that go?
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The Greek is Christos. This one. Or he was the Christ, which sounds like a confession of faith. That's the easiest way to read it. There's a couple problems with that.
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It was.
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The middle word is really important. Yes, exactly. Because if you think about it, Christians do not say Jesus was the Christ. They say he is the Christ. And this is not a simple technicality. This actually gets at the core claim of Christianity that Jesus is not dead. He rose from the dead and is still alive. And I looked in that Greek database that covers all of ancient Greek literature and medieval Greek literature to see if there are any instances where a Christian writer said that he was the Christ. And I couldn't find any. The closest I could get was a few instances where, for instance, Paul the Apostle, in his Letter to the Corinthians, he talks about that rock that is in Exodus, and he says that rock was Christ, but there, the referent is the rock, the rock was Christ. He's not saying Jesus was the Christ or used to be the Christ. And so it's very odd. It just looks like if someone was tampering with this, they would have changed that to is.
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But that word can also be translated like he seemed, and he was thought to be.
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So that seemed there. There's two things going on. One is the Greek says he was the Christ. Jerome's Latin translation of the passage does not say he was the Christ. It says he was believed to be the Christ. And then Jacob of Edessa's Syriac translation, and Jacob is writing after Jerome, but could not be using Jerome. Jacob did not read Latin. Latin and Syriac are separated by hundreds and hundreds of miles. Jacob's translation there says he was thought to be the Christ. And we have some other evidence as well, like the Arabic translation. There's a Latin paraphrase. What we have here are two eminent ancient scholars and translators, and their versions of this match effectively two different languages.
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They're converging hundreds of years apart, hundreds of miles away from each other, according to the same. But they're receiving the Greek the same way.
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Yes. And so what seems to be going on is that they have a Greek manuscript of Josephus Antiquities in front of them that does not read he was the Christ. It reads something along the lines of Jesus was considered to be thought to be believed to be the Christ. And fascinatingly, this matches how Josephus refers to Jesus in that second reference where he talks about James and his martyrdom. And there he doesn't say Jesus was the Christ, he says Jesus was called the Christ. So he qualifies it. I argue in my book that this is the original reading of the testimony of Flavianum, that it's not that Jesus was the Christ, it is that he was thought to be or believed to be the Christ. And this follows the regular practice of textual criticism. When scholars are assembling an ancient text, they take all textual witnesses. They take original manuscripts. If there are any translations of an ancient text, which there almost never are, but in our case, we have several ancient translations, they gather all of that to assemble the original authorial text. So what I do is just what scholars always do with ancient texts. I take all the textual witnesses, including Latin and Syriac translations. And I think the fairest reading is that, yeah, here Josephus said that Jesus was thought to be or believed to be the Christ. You mentioned another passage, though. You said seemed, that is, with the phrase involving Jesus resurrection. That phrase is often translated by scholars as he, meaning Jesus, appeared to them, the disciples, so he appeared to them alive again after three days. It's often translated as affirming the resurrection of Jesus. I point out that the operative Greek word in that passage is the Greek word phinomai. And if you look that word up in Greek dictionaries, it can also mean seem. And if we put that meaning into that passage, all of A sudden it becomes Jesus seemed to them to be alive again after three days. All of a sudden it's no longer a confession of the resurrection, it's simply a historical report about what the disciples believed. It all of a sudden begins looking exactly like something Josephus would say and is no longer suspicious. So the question that I investigate is that a legitimate way to translate it, just because a word can mean that, doesn't mean it should mean that. And your listeners can read in the free PDF on the book website. I do a lot of intense linguistic investigation. And it turns out that in order for a Greek writer to signal to his readers whether that word means appear or whether it means seem, you have to put the word in a certain grammatical construction. And the grammatical construction that Josephus uses to mean seem is the one he uses in the Testimonium Flavianum. It's not only possible, I think it's by far the most likely way to interpret that passage. All of a sudden, then all of a sudden the passage with just those two ways of understanding it. So no longer is Jesus was the Christ, it's he was thought to be the Christ, no longer is it he appeared alive again, it's he seemed to them to be alive again. All of a sudden, the two strongest objections to the authenticity of the passage no longer apply.
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And you have basically been taking the lectionary developed by Thackeray, or the dictionary developed by Thackeray a hundred years ago, and have done an entire analysis of how these words appear everywhere else in Josephus, and basically they all match up that these are not atypical words for him to be using. It makes sense, given his hundreds of thousands of words that he wrote, that he would be saying this passage. And when we understand it, the context of his corpus, the objections to this being inauthentic fall away. Now, do you believe, along with Firmesh, that Josephus was writing a sympathetic but non committal portrait of Christ in the testimony of Flavianum, or do you think he was actually writing a critical portrait?
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Clearly, the passage is not overtly negative. And also it's clear the passage is not overtly fabulously pro Christian. It's somewhere in between. I think the passage is somewhat ambiguous, which does follow what Josephus often does. He will often say things where you're reading and you're thinking, but what do you think about it, Josephus? What is your opinion? He often does that. And I think the passage certainly has aspects that can be positive. That doesn't mean Josephus couldn't have said it. He certainly could have had a positive view of Jesus and just thought that Christian gone out of control in interpreting some things that Jesus said or did. That's very possible. But there are just several aspects of the passage that verge on being negative. Paradoxa is one of them. Another passage is Jesus taught those who receive truisms with pleasure. That passage is often translated as truth. Who receive truth with pleasure. That sounds extremely positive that Jesus is teaching people who receive truth with pleasure. What can be wrong with that? But in the original Greek it's just not so positive. Instead of truth, it's actually this sort of abbreviated form of truth, like truths, but which pertain to lesser humdrum facts, things like that. And then that word with pleasure in Greek, this is a Greek philosophical term that usually is thought of as something bad. This is where we get our word hedonism from. It's the Greek word hedone. And when Josephus uses that phrase, the phrase receive with pleasure is an odd phrase, but Josephus likes it. He uses it seven, eight other times elsewhere. And he often will use it to indicate something that is apparently overly zealous or heedless, that people are getting ahead of themselves. And in other words, it looks like what he's trying to say is that the disciples of Jesus were too aggressive, they were too heedless or foolish or at least suggesting that a little bit over the top.
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Yeah, it's an exaggerated language describing their actions. Precisely. They're getting their lead guy, the brother of Jesus, they're getting themselves stoned, they're getting themselves crucified, they're going all over, everywhere. They're making a mess of things. Maybe it's a bit like Monty Python. It seems like he is respectful of Jesus but somewhat critical of the rest of the community. Those following in his wake up. I'm curious if you put Josephus as a source of eyewitness testimony. I remember some years ago for New Testament class in college, I was doing a report on Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses in which he makes the argument that anytime a non public figure, so not Herod, not Pontius Pilate, but someone like Peter or Mary or very minor little characters. Simon of Cyrene who carries the cross of Jesus and his two sons are mentioned. Anytime little known figures like these are cited, that would be some kind of claim of a citation that this person here, like Luke's prologue to his gospel to Theophilus about the group of eyewitnesses where some are dead, but some of them are still alive, that you can go and find this person or the person who's continuing this person's testimony that this person's alive. And you can check it basically to prove what I'm saying is Josephus doing something similar with his portrayal of the recent events. Because there's that very curious language in which he says, the first men among us, right? He's identifying himself and the third person plural there. Who are the first men? Why does he say the first men among us? Does he use that phrase elsewhere in his writings? What does that indicate?
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When I was writing the book, I thought I was done with the book and I was writing the conclusion, and I thought I should probably have a few paragraphs about where Josephus got his information about Jesus, about his provenance of this passage.
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Where did he get his information, if it's authentic, to start saying these things and describe.
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Exactly. And I remember sitting at my desk and I was rereading the testimony in Flavianum, and I'd read it hundreds of times in many languages, and all of a sudden something stuck out to me. When Josephus is mentioning how Jesus was crucified, he says, the first men among us accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate. And I thought, where have I heard that word, first men before? In Greek, it's protoi. I've heard that. I've heard Josephus use that term before. Where have I seen that? So I do some searching around, and I figure out that in Josephus autobiography that in 51 or 52 A.D. he says, I began continually meeting with the first men of Jerusalem. And then he says that again and again over the next 20 years of his life. And I thought, wow, I wonder if those first men in Jerusalem in 51 AD that some of them were the first men 20 years earlier who had Jesus crucified. And that just opened up this fabulous field of investigation where I wonder if Josephus is telling us where he got his information from, when he says, not just the first men, but the first men among us that he's indicating. I knew some of these guys, I knew some of these men. And what I did firstly is to see how often does he use the first men pro toi. And he uses that term frequently, and he uses it frequently in his autobiography to talk about his association with the first men in Jerusalem in the 50s and 60s. Then I look at the phrase among us. Does he like that phrase? What does he mean by it? He uses it about 50 other times, and he thoroughly enjoys the phrase. And I show that he seems to use that phrase to indicate personal knowledge. Again and again, he has the opportunity to use the phrase as simply a general term for Jews, the first men among the Jews. It's just a catchphrase. But he never uses the phrase to indicate Jews in a sense of which he was not personally involved in that. Remember, he's writing a work of history covering hundreds and hundreds of years, so he has many opportunities to talk about the Jews. Say, this happened to us. This happened to us. In a situation where he could never have had any kind of personal connection. And he never does it again and again. Every time he deploys that phrase, he seems to indicate that he was aware of or personally connected with whatever he's talking about.
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This, I'm guessing, is a phrase that comes up a lot in the Jewish war. Yes, because he was an eyewitness and a participant to all those events. And it's also where he concocts his own autobiography as one of the. A bit like Xenophon, the Anabasis, one of the greatest stories of ancient history is himself this historian.
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That's a great. That's a great. I remember reading the Anabasis in college. That's wonderful.
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B
But to stick with the Jews rather than the Greeks, Josephus in the Jewish war has proximity to all the main guys. He knows all of them. Those are his sources. But here he's doing something similar in the antiquities of the Jews. Most of the time, most of these things, he's drawing from a written record, this from various groups of sources, Jewish and Gentile. This, however, is something that he is citing for himself and the people that he knew. Right. So who would some of these people be? Who would have been his eyewitnesses that he would have known personally from his time growing up in Jerusalem that would have been. Participated in this event? Perhaps people who. His father.
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That's the question. Who is he talking about? Let's not be content with Vegas.
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Specify, specify.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So there are several possibilities that I go over in my book. I have about 10 candidates that Josephus might have been referring to as the first men among us. One is the head of the Sanhedrin. Simon. He's the head of the sanhedrin in the 60s, maybe the 50s. We don't know exactly when he started. Josephus knows him directly. His father is Gamaliel. Rabbi Gamaliel, mentioned in the book of Acts as putting the apostles on trial with the Sanhedrin. And Gamaliel surely was part of the Sanhedrin trial of Jesus. So it's very possible he's talking about Simon, who easily could have been an adult part of the Sanhedrin during the trial of Jesus. Simon is one possibility. Another possibility is one high priest, Joshua, son of Gamala. Joshua of Gamala. He's friends with Joshua. He doesn't just know him. He says he's my friend and companion. He was high priest in 64 AD and he calls Joshua the second oldest of the chief priests. And I don't need to emphasize that you don't become the oldest of the chief priests by being a young man. So if he was the second oldest of the chief priests in 60, Josephus says this about 68 AD 69. Presumably Joshua is in his 70s or 80s by this point. So he would have been an adult in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified to become high priest in 64. He's going to have been a man of enormous standing 30 years previously. Obviously very possible for him to be part of the trial. The Gospels say that at the trial of Jesus, all the chief priests were there. The whole Sanhedrin was there. It's very possible Joshua was there. Another possibility are members of the Herodian dynasty. The Herodians are the Jewish kings who are subservient to the Romans. But they're still in charge. But they have to negotiate with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for the local kings. Josephus friends with Herod Agrippa ii. Herod would have been a very young boy when Jesus was crucified. But Josephus does know other Herodians. He knows. He seems to know the son of Salome is the girl. She's a teenager who dances for the
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head of John the Baptist and requests his head.
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Yes.
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Dances for Herod and demands the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.
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Yes.
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And she gets it.
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Yes.
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Very messed up family.
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So Josephus knows her son. We can say that with a high degree of probability. It's very plausible that he knew Salome herself. We know that she lived to at least the late 60s, maybe to 70s. But again, another possible plausible connection, the most likely connection is Josephus, supreme commander, his direct commander in the Jewish war. Remember that Josephus was one of seven generals. Above these seven generals is a supreme commander. His name is Ananus ii. This is the same Ananus II who had James, the brother of Jesus executed,
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which we get mentioned in the second passage in 2200.
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Exactly. So Josephus already knows a man who had the brother of Jesus executed, which is striking.
- [35:22]
B
He knows Caiaphas. He would have known people who were around Caiaphas he knows the Harris. In your book you say that the people who interrogate Jesus, it's before the scourging begins, right? It's after he's initially arrested in Gethsemane. Caiaphas sources would have been in there during that interrogation, right? In which Caiaphas says, are you the Christ? And then he quotes both Psalms in Daniel where he says, so you say, and you shall see the Son of man coming in in clouds of glory. Which is signifying a moment in which the king is actually more powerful than the priest inside the temple. And that's when Caiaphas rents his garments. Like Josephus, his sources would have been present during when all that's happening.
- [36:01]
A
Exactly. So my argument is that is twofold. One is that Josephus has enormous and extensive connections in Jerusalem and Galilee from people who were around and adults in 3033 AD. So he has many opportunities to know people who knew Jesus. But more specifically, secondly, he also knows people who would or should have been at the trial of Jesus himself. And the most plausible candidate is this Ananus II, who is high priest in 62 AD. He's directly known by Josephus. His first father was Annas, the high priest who supervises the trial of Jesus. Ananus II's brother in law was Caiaphas, as you said. And in my book I show that Ananus II was an adult in 30 AD. He's an adult when his brother in law is high priest and his father is high priest emeritus. And I show that in the Gospels Jesus is arrested, he is brought to the house of Annas, he's brought to the house of Josephus, commander's father on Passover, when Jesus was arrested, it was required of all Jews according to Torah law, to celebrate the Passover in the house of your father and to spend the night there. So when Jesus was brought to the high priest Annas house, Josephus commander was required to be in that location at that very time. And that means that Josephus commander must have been at the trial of Jesus, the portion of which took place in the house of the high priest. I think that is who Josephus is talking about when he says the first men among us accused Jesus. He's talking about his commander, who is the son of the high priest who accused Jesus. He's also talking about potentially all these other people, Rabbi Gamaliel, members of the Herodian dynasty, Joshua of Gamala, who was his friend, any number of other high priests and members of the Sanhedrin whom Josephus knew as well.
- [38:10]
B
I Love history for its own sake. But you have argued for the authenticity of the text and the proximity of this brief passage to the sources who would have been there during the crucial events at the end of Jesus life. What is the significance of the veracity of this passage and of Josephus and the significance of Josephus sources having been close when all this is happening, what is the significance of this?
- [38:39]
A
One simple upshot is that this is just fascinating and amazing. We get a new window into Jesus. But the other upshot is this affects
- [38:47]
B
why is this passage so important?
- [38:49]
A
What this passage does is it shows that the narrative framing of Jesus ministry in the four Gospels is now affirmed by the greatest Jewish historian who ever lived in the ancient world. One of the greatest historians of the ancient world. He describes Jesus in a way. He places him during the governorship of Pontius Pilate, during the high priesthood of Caiaphas. He says that Jesus had many disciples. He says that Jesus worked miracles. He's not sure he likes those miracles. But that also follows what the Gospels say. That Jesus was accused of the performing miracles with the aid of demonic forces. And Josephus terminology may back that up. Paradoxa that Josephus is unsure where these things are coming from. It backs up the Gospel claim that it was the first men, the leading men of the Jews, who accused Jesus. But it was actually Pontius Pilate who executed Jesus. And most importantly, Josephus says that the story of Jesus resurrection was not concocted decades and decades later by later generations of Christians. Instead, it was the disciples of Jesus themselves who believed that Jesus was resurrected on the third day, as Josephus says. This overturns a lot of contemporary secular scholarship which argues that even the general narrative of the Gospels is untrustworthy and that the story of the resurrection of was fabricated much much later, after the fact, using the testimony in Flavianum. It's that the general narrative of the Gospels is historically sound and that the idea that Jesus worked miracles and that Jesus was resurrected are reports that appear almost immediately after Jesus death. His miracles, I think according to many scholars, were circulating during Jesus ministry. And then the report of his resurrection seems can now plausibly be placed at the feet of the disciples on day three after the crucifixion. This sheds enormous light on the Jesus of history. No longer are we simply reliant on Christian testimony for the general contours of Jesus life. We now can rely on non Christian Jewish testimony from a man who is born and raised in Jerusalem and knew many of the people who had to do with the early Jesus movement, but were not pro Christian, were either neutral or anti Christian.
- [41:18]
B
This is being recorded right around when Holy Week is coming up. By the time so it's release, it might just be right after Easter. Also Passover will just be about to begin. So this is an especially timely topic to be discussing these core issues dealing with Judaism and Christianity from 2000 years ago that are still relevant for us today. I think as I recall that there's a passage in St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 in which he's reciting a passage they had previously given to the Corinthians. And if you line it up with his story in Acts of the Apostles, he possibly got it from Peter and John and maybe James when he spent some time with them three years after his initial conversion, him being an enemy and a skeptic, and then his shift on the road to Damascus, he then has this little creed, something that you would have memorized in a pre literate oral culture. What is that passage specifically you're referring to?
- [42:18]
A
1 Corinthians 15 where he talks about the resurrection appearances of Jesus.
- [42:23]
B
I'm reciting to you now what I'd previously given to you. This is something that he probably got from the apostles.
- [42:28]
A
It's like a little creed to say catechism. Yeah. He says that I give to you what I received from the first, that when Jesus arose, that he has a list. And he says he appeared to cephas, then the 12, he appeared to James, then all the apostles, then he appeared to more than 500 brothers, most of whom are now still alive. And then last of all, he appeared to me.
- [42:50]
B
He says, and this is something that's usually dated within perhaps five years at most of when this formulation would have been created post the crucifixion of Christ, and sometimes as early as two years. This is according to the scholars like William Lynn Craig or Gary Habermas and so on. And this is then that's usually outside of the Gospels themselves, the closest we get to the early belief in the Resurrection. But something like Josephus testimony would be providing an outsized skeptical source, confirming possibly such an early start date that it's not some later tradition, but it had been around for a long time.
- [43:27]
A
Exactly. And I would also add that this attempt to find non Christian sources about Jesus is very understandable, and that's what I do in my book. But I want us not to obscure historical sources based on overly defining them. Because if we are looking for non Christian sources, in a sense, we already had one in the Apostle Paul, he was a non Christian, he was murdering Christians and he changed his mind due to this experience that he had with Jesus appearing to him. So when we ask who are our non Christian sources? Paul in many ways should count. He was a non Christian who became a Christian because he Jesus appeared to him. In other words, we want to be careful not to exclude sources simply because they believe something. We should take sources on their own merits. And if we make an analogy to any kind of scholarly or scientific investigation, it would be interesting to look at. If you take a given theory and you want to read the naysayers of that theory, that's well and good. But what if some of the pro theorists actually used to be naysayers and encountered some evidence and changed their mind? That's a different category. It seems like we shouldn't just lump them in with being the pro theorists. They were naysayers but encountered some evidence and changed their mind. And we have that with the Apostle Paul. And Josephus never seems to have changed his mind, so he counts as a naysayer. But I say all that to indicate that we do have a variety of sources and perspectives regarding the resurrection of Jesus.
- [45:15]
B
The Gospels themselves offer four very different perspectives on Christ. There's some similar material in Matthew and Luke, which gets attributed to some Q source. And there's some things in Mark, but there's also things in Mark which are not in Matthew or Luke. And there's some things in Matthew which is not Luke and Luke and not in Matthew. And then there's John, which is this whole other kind of hybrid version. Also my favorite. But there's some books that I've read that sort of make the argument for the historical reliability or at least worth taking a second look at the Gospels. Recent one was Peter Williams. There's many Peter Williams apologists out there in Christian apologetics, but Peter Williams, can
- [45:52]
A
we trust the Gospels at Tyndale House?
- [45:53]
B
Yes, at Tyndale House.
- [45:55]
A
That's excellent.
- [45:56]
B
There is, which I mentioned earlier, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bachman, another excellent one. And he writes the the Rest of Resurrection of the Son of God and the New Testament and the People of God book series.
- [46:04]
A
That's very good.
- [46:05]
B
Also, he has a good biography of St. Paul. Williams quotes the scholar Lydia McGrew. There's what she calls the unintended coincidences within the Gospels. That is, if you look at later gospels, like some of the Gnostic texts in later centuries, they're very streamlined, stripped down, very basic texts. There's not much, little details Giving you the atmosphere and the place. All those, all the extraneous stuff is taken away. It's like Ernest Hemingway on steroids. And it's just very basic, stripped down version. Instead, when you look at the four Gospels, there's the trees of Jericho, there's some guy who's standing up on a roof and he's short and he's looking in, right? There's tiny little things and all these details are elaborating the story, but they're so unnecessary. Right. And the Gospels, it's profound, profuse within them. Can you describe some of that?
- [46:56]
A
Yes. You're referring to Lydia Magru's book Undesigned Coincidences. It's a wonderful book. And she points out that when people investigate the historical reliability of texts, they often default understandably into this mode of cross checking where they will take a text like one of the Gospels and they'll cross check it with other ancient witnesses that we have to see if they line up. And that's very valid and that's good. In fact, that's probably the foundational way to examine the reliability of a text. But there is another way, and that is to look to see how the text at hand complements and informs and lines up and coordinates with other texts in ways that do not seem to be intended by the author. In ways that in any eyewitness testimony, if you record eyewitness testimony, there's going to be all these extraneous details that are just that just come out that the eyewitness just mentions offhand that don't really add much to the testimony. But when you start lining up these eyewitness accounts with another eyewitness at the same event, you'll start realizing some of these details actually help inform this other account and balance it and flesh it out and complement it and confirm it. So she does that with the Gospels and she finds all sorts of remarkable examples of this. One example is Jesus is near Bethesda in Galilee, and it's the feeding of the 5,000. And there's all these people and they're in the wilderness. They're walking around and you're wondering, why are there all these people here? And he tells, I think it's Andrew, where can we buy bread? And things like that. These are all inconsequential details on first glance. There's lots of people, the grass is green, he's talking to Andrew, they're near Bethesda. It turns out when you compare the feeding of the 5,000, which is spoken about in multiple Gospels, these Details begin to build a broader picture. Why are there all these people around? Because it's actually the season of Passover. So they're pilgrims, of course, there's hordes, there's hundreds of thousands of Jews walking through these untrodden paths at this time. Because they're going to Jerusalem. Why is the grass green? Because it's springtime time. It's Passover, which is one of the rarer times when the grass is green in Judea at that time, or Galilee. Why does he talk to Andrew about where can we get food? Well, they're in Bethesda. And one of the Gospels mentions that Andrew is from Bethesda. But the Gospel that mentions Andrew's from Bethesda is not the Gospel that says that Jesus was near Bethesda. And so Andrew presumably knows the area. All of that adds this historical texture to it. It increases the verisimilitude, the reliability of this text. You can also do this with other texts. So you could compare the Gospels to Josephus, for example, for the same purposes, to look for undesigned coincidences. And here's another example. In the Gospel of Luke, I believe Jesus is in Jericho, he's approaching Jerusalem, and he stops to tell a parable. The parable is unique to Luke, and in it he mentions this king who goes off to another country to be crowned and then come back. It's an odd parable because you wouldn't think that a king needs to go to another country to be crowned in his kingdom. Usually you get crowned in your own kingdom, but you read Josephus and you pay attention to details and things start making sense. Because, of course, the brute fact is that that's what the Herodian kings had to do. They had to go to Rome to be crowned. So that makes sense. But the deeper undesigned coincidence is that just about a decade or two, 20 or so years, 30 years before Jesus said that parable, Josephus tells us that one of the Herodians was in Jericho and gave a speech about how he needed to go to Rome to be crowned. And when he went to Rome to be crowned, a certain segment of the Jewish population sent a delegation to protest him becoming king, which is exactly what Jesus says happens in this parable. And Herod still becomes king and comes back. What it looks like is happening here is that Luke, who tells Jesus, telling this parable, he knows this context, but doesn't tell the audience this. It's immaterial to him. It doesn't matter. So he just drops some details in this Parable he mentions it happens to be in Jericho. All of a sudden it looks like Jesus is telling this zinger of a parable. It has deep historical meaning to his contemporary audience. They would be aware of it, but the audience of Luke has no idea. But we are able to recover that original meaning through these undesigned coincidences, through these details that come out which relate
- [51:38]
B
not just among the gospels, but also to Josephus.
- [51:40]
A
To Josephus, yes.
- [51:41]
B
Okay, bonus lightning round. If you could ask Josephus one thing, you were interviewing him, what would it be?
- [51:48]
A
I would want to know what his supreme commander, Ananus said about Jesus, because I think his supreme commander was at the trial of Jesus.
- [51:54]
B
Was Josephus sources the thing that surprised you the most or was there something else?
- [51:59]
A
Yeah, it was his connections to Jesus. I had no idea when I started writing the book.
- [52:03]
B
Favorite ancient historian besides Josephus.
- [52:06]
A
Am I cheating if I say Eusebius of Caesarea?
- [52:09]
B
No, that can count.
- [52:09]
A
Yeah. He's the king of history in my book.
- [52:11]
B
Okay. Herodotus is for me.
- [52:13]
A
Oh, really? The oldest.
- [52:15]
B
Well, it's the most literary. It's like Arabian Nights.
- [52:17]
A
Yeah.
- [52:18]
B
But I also think a lot of his stuff tends to get vindicated as the years go by. They found an Egyptian ship that he had described and that ship was found in the Mediterranean, almost perfectly preserved according to matching his description.
- [52:30]
A
They find one footed men who.
- [52:32]
B
No, but they have found fire ants in India that are tied somehow to the metal cold.
- [52:36]
A
Oh, wow. Okay. All right.
- [52:38]
B
But a couple other questions. If you could recover one ancient text that's been lost to us, what would it be?
- [52:45]
A
It would just one text. Not a corpus, but a text.
- [52:48]
B
Just one text. It can be a big text.
- [52:49]
A
It can be a big text. It would probably be the five books of Papias on the sayings of the Lord. On the sayings of the Lord. Can I give a second one? The second one would be the works of Hegesippus, who's this sort of Jewish Christian historian around the year 180.
- [53:04]
B
How has the reception been to this book and what do you hope to do from here?
- [53:07]
A
It's been very positive. I've been invited to do book talks at Princeton, at Oxford University. I'm doing a debate at Harvard in the beginning of April. In 2026, there was a book panel at the Society of Biblical Literature on the book with some very prestigious scholars. It's been reviewed four or five times already in academic journals which, you know, academics. We move the pace of snails. So the fact that there's already four or five reviews is quite good. It's been very positive reception. I'm optimistic that I've moved the field forward regarding the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum in terms of my future plans. I've got so much going on, I can't list it all. I've got articles I'm writing on the history of the date of Christmas. I've got another article on a very early Christian artifact that is underway. I hope to do a second edition of this book, or at least a complimentary article to go over some additional evidence, clear up some things, clarify other aspects, answer some critics. I've got a translation of the fragments of the earliest commentary on the Book of Revelation from around the year 200. I've discovered some new ones from this particular commentary, so I'm putting those together and hopefully be publishing them. I'm editing a book on an artifact in the Vatican, the Statue of Hippolytus from 222 A.D. if any of your listeners have a chance to go to the Apostolic Library at the Vatican and see this statue, do it. It is one of the most extraordinary early Christian artifacts in existence and I'm part of a team doing a monograph on that.
- [54:38]
B
If there's one event in history that you could go back and witness personally, Doctor who style, what would it be?
- [54:43]
A
That's easy. The Resurrection, hands down.
- [54:45]
B
Which part, though, what would specifically, would you just wait out all night camping out?
- [54:50]
A
What would you be doing? I would want to see Mary Magdalene going to the tomb and Jesus appearing to her.
- [54:56]
B
If you literally see the gardener before she does, right? I mean, do you just stay away? Are you going to be like, I know I can't intervene, Lord, I know. There's that meme of the time traveler who comes back to hear Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and then he immediately says, in perfect English, go home now.
- [55:12]
A
You shouldn't be here.
- [55:14]
B
I went to St. John's College and the idea of reading an ancient text like Plato's Republic is that you get to go back in time through this text and be there when this conversation is happening. So I guess you could say similar to the point of reading the Gospels in this kind of Johnny spirit, is that you also get to be there with Mary Magdalene. When Jesus meets Mary Magdalene, he's also meeting you through there.
- [55:34]
A
Yeah, I would say if it wasn't Mary Magdalene, it would be when Jesus appears to Peter. Paul mentions this appearance and Luke mentions it, but they only just say it happened. They don't describe it at all. And I'd love to see what actually happened there.
- [55:46]
B
Is this after he's seen the empty tomb?
- [55:48]
A
Yeah. And he's running back, presumably because he's seen the empty tomb. He runs back to report back. And then two disciples are going to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them. They return back to Jerusalem and they say Jesus appeared to us. And the disciples say he also appeared to Simon Peter. And then Paul also mentions that he appeared to Cephas. I believe I'll have to double check that. But we don't know what happened there.
- [56:11]
B
And I'd love to know, is the Holy Grail real?
- [56:15]
A
I think it was real. I think there was a cup. I don't think it's real.
- [56:19]
B
What about the Spear of Christ, the
- [56:21]
A
Spear of Destiny, The Holy Lance? I don't think it's real. I think if something was real, I think it would be the nails of the cross that Helena, the mother of Constantine finds when she's looking for the tomb. And there's fairly good evidence that those were incorporated into the crown of Charlemagne and then Napoleon then repurposed them. And I think they're still in Italy, in Turin or Ravenna. I visited it. I saw it.
- [56:48]
B
What about the Veil of Veronica?
- [56:50]
A
I don't think so.
- [56:51]
B
I'm a Catholic, so maybe this is a Protestant Catholic.
- [56:53]
A
I know this is not Shroud of Turin.
- [56:55]
B
I mean, that one even Protestants sometimes.
- [56:57]
A
I know there are Protestants that do. I know I am skeptical. I will say that the statistics you hear, the data you hear is very impressive.
- [57:03]
B
Carbon dating always keeps getting pushed further and further. And then if it is fake, it's the most astounding piece of artwork ever. I mean, to have foreshadowed negative photography.
- [57:11]
A
Negative photography. I know.
- [57:12]
B
It only became significant because of that. I think it's the image of Odessa.
- [57:16]
A
Yes, yes.
- [57:17]
B
And so that would explain its history when it would have been folded up. When it says in the Gospels that John went in and what he saw made him believe. What did he see but say there was some extraordinary event in the radiation caused the image to have been imprinted on what have been the burial shroud. That would have made him believe Jesus image being imprinted on the shroud.
- [57:34]
A
That's true. That's true. My issue with it is that many of the claims that are made about it sound very impressive. I don't know how to check them. So it'd be awesome if it was true.
- [57:47]
B
Another episode. Professor Schmidt. Tom, thank you for joining us on the Madison's Notes podcast and for explaining to us the Gospel according to the ancient historian Josephus. To everyone, a Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Thank you for listening. See you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast. A transcript for this interview will be made available on the new Madison's Notes substack page, along with a copy of the audio recording. If you desire further Madison's Notes content, please check our episode catalog and subscribe to receive future ones. We are always grateful for any likes and positive ratings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast.
- [58:47]
A
Sa.