“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 5A – ‘the placement of the Testimonium Flavianum’.

Despite the hopes I expressed in my previous post I simply cannot complete even one more response to Tom Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Instead, I will place here my draft that addresses only one small part of Schmidt’s rationale for finding the Jesus account placed in the midst of various disturbances. Better to half-fulfil a promise than to come up with a complete blank. Please keep in mind that the following is a copy of my draft. Normally I would take time to tidy up the wording and structure.

Tom Schmidt writes (my bolded highlighting):

First, its placement. In the Antiquities, the TF [i.e. the Testimonium Flavianum, the Flavius Josephus’s testimony about Jesus] is situated amid five different stories of uproar, all of which tell of murder, intrigue, blasphemy, and other wrongdoing. Given the context, it is unlikely that a Christian scribe would have risked associating Jesus with such themes by inserting the TF amid a litany of evildoers and disturbances, as the author of the TF pointedly does. (Schmidt 2025, 128)

Sounds reasonable. But then I recall reading the following:

The Christian movement itself was doubtless a θόρυβος [“disturbance”], the greatest disturbance of all . . . [T]he Christian movement was so obviously a disturbance of the first magnitude, as it is represented in the New Testament . . . (Thackeray 2007, 140f)

With that perspective in mind, surely a Christian scribe who was pretending to be Josephus would consider it most appropriate to place the Jesus passage in the middle of disturbances that horrified or at least were noted by a Jewish author. Thackeray does not suggest a Christian did add the account there but by acknowledging its appropriateness from the perspective of a non-Christian Jew he does allow for one to think even a Christian impersonating Josephus would likewise consider its place among other disturbances in the time of Pilate quite suitable.

Even so, the account about Jesus and his followers is not depicted as a disturbance. Any notion of a disturbance must come from the reader’s knowledge of how “the Christian movement” was “represented in the New Testament”.

Further — it is just as reasonable to suggest that a Christian scribe would relish placing his Gospel-informed Jesus in a position to suggest his power to unsettle the Jewish rulers.

Note: one must know both the canonical gospels and Acts to see this episode as a “disturbance” and so justify its “placement” among somewhat comparable episodes.

Schmidt argues that because in Josephus we read that Jesus was crucified, it logically follows that Jesus must have been a subversive, a rebel, and the reader is meant to conclude that he created some kind of disturbance. But that is not what we read in Josephus’s text. The passage does not describe any kind of disturbance initiated by Jesus. Disturbance has to be read into the passage, not out of it.

On the contrary, the passage in Josephus leads any reader ignorant of the New Testament to wonder why Jesus was crucified given that it infers that Jesus’ followers felt renewed spiritual inspiration after the crucifixion, and that the crucifixion accelerated their movement rather than handicapped it.

Finally, one enduring aporia in New Testament scholarship concerns the question of why Jesus was crucified. Pilate, a figure who is historically cruel and unintimidated by mobs, in the gospels yields to mob pressure to crucify a man he knows to be innocent – even though that mob had days earlier venerated the same Jesus. Religious leaders, who in historical accounts are known for their popular sympathies, in the gospels hate Jesus because he does good. If we assume the gospels are trying to hide the “real reason” for the crucifixion to protect theological interests, then we would surely be right to expect an independent historical record, one written by a Jew/Judean whom the gospels represent as the enemies of Jesus, would explain for us exactly why Jesus was crucified.

But no. The Josephan account knows nothing more than the Gospels. The Josephan account is just as mysterious as the gospels. It leaves the reason for the crucifixion unexplained.

I’d like to think that I will post 5B later this year/early next year.

Postscript on the subversive Jesus hypothesis:

To veer off into another question – of course the crucifixion of Jesus is at its core a theological event, not an historical one. Its reason is theological. As such, it is constructed narratively around the Jewish Scriptures that point to a saving figure who must take on all the sins of his people, to suffer their worst humiliations and weaknesses, to be despised as a nobody, as an evildoer, even as a rebel. The motifs are theological, not historical. The rebel-bandit-robber motif is as consistent with the interests of the authors as are the miracles and resurrection. And this is where the current “subversive Jesus hypothesis” collapses at the starting post.

• Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Thackeray, H. St John. 2007. Josephus: The Man and the Historian. With George Foot Moore and Samuel Sandmel. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger.