How Josephus Composed His Account of Jesus: New Evidence for Its Authenticity and Source

What is it about?

A famous description of Jesus in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities has long had its authenticity questioned. Due to its resemblance to Christian writings, it has been proposed to have been heavily edited by Christian scribes, if not a complete forgery. In this article, I apply a novel approach to the problem by making use of the copious research on Josephus’s methods of composing his Antiquities. I demonstrate that the resemblance of the Jesus account to Christian writings is attributable to Josephus having employed his typical compositional methods in order to paraphrase a Christian source very much like, or even identical to, the Emmaus narrative of Luke (Luke 24:18–27). Because many sources that Josephus used throughout the Antiquities are known, his habitual techniques for altering the language of the source for his work have been catalogued by many researchers. In a phrase-by-phrase study, this article finds that the Jesus account can be derived from the 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. The article also shows that this result is very unlikely to be the result of coincidence or the work of a forger. The reasonable conclusion is that, contrary to the views of many skeptics, the Antiquities’ Jesus account should be considered to be an authentic work by Josephus.

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Why is it important?

The gospels were written many years after Jesus, and so whether they accurately portray a historical person has often been questioned. The most extreme view is that the gospels are wholly invented and Jesus is only a mythical figure. To address these issues, the evidence of Antiquities’ Jesus account is indispensible. If it is authentic, it verifies the essential historicity of the gospel stories. The new paraphrase evidence given in this article indicates that the Antiquities’ account is authentic. Josephus’s account is thus the oldest evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament. As the Antiquities is known to have been published in 93/94 CE, it provides the first firm date for the transmission of Jesus’s story. It likely even precedes the publication of some of the gospels and provides evidence for an early circulation of the Emmaus story. If it is accepted that Josephus employed a Christian source, is it possible he simply transmitted it uncritically without knowing if it was true or false? From the knowledge of Josephus’s historical methods, we know this is not possible. He staked his reputation on using reliable sources, and in this case, he would have personal knowledge of its validity: having grown up among the priests of Jerusalem the 30’s and 40’s CE, he would have known of the presence or absence of stories about Jesus. Using the Emmaus-like source is his guarantee he thought it accurately represented what was said about Jesus at that time.

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