Like all the rest of the non-Christian writers whose writings “prove” the historical existence of Jesus, Josephus was not born until after Jesus, man or myth, was safely dead. It is impossible to consider Josephus as a contemporary witness, everything Josephus has relayed must be considered hearsay, it cannot be anything else as he could not have witnessed events before his own birth! Joseph ben Mattathias was born in 37 CE. He was from a privileged Jewish background, he travelled to Rome as a young man and was very impressed with its civilization, he was later forced into a Jewish rebellion against Rome and was captured, in his later life as a Roman citizen he took the name Flavius Josephus. Given his upbringing of orthodox Judaism and his adopted Roman political sympathies he is as likely to be proclaiming Jesus as the Jewish Messiah as Shakespeare would be calling the murderer of a king a working class hero. It is simply incredible for such a man to make such an identification, it goes against everything he believed in.
Parts of your passage quoted above are disputed among scholars, and most believe they were inserted. The Christian apologist scholar Origen, writing a century after the time of Josephus, states clearly that the Jew Josephus does not acknowledge Jesus as Messiah. And yet later, after the establishment of the official Roman church the Christian Eusebius produces the only extant copy of the work of Josephus and lo and behold it contains a clear reference to Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Of course it is faked. Clumsily. There is a lot of controversy over exactly how much of the passage is faked.
It is believed that Josepheus mentioned Jesus and his trial and death, but the reference about him being "the Christ" or that he rose from the dead are believed to be christian forgeries.
__________________ DizzyDee
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell  |