This is just a short public service announcement drawing attention to T. C. Schmidt’s hot-off-the-digital-presses Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford 2025). An anonymous donation made the book open access.

I have only read the introduction plus a few other subsections and I would like to a full review later, but so far, I’m impressed. It’s not often that one gets a chance to make a real intervention in such a contested question of ancient history, and it looks as if Schmidt might have done just that.

Here’s the book’s abstract:

This book brings to light an extraordinary connection between Jesus of Nazareth and the Jewish historian Josephus. Writing in 93/4 ce, Josephus composed an account of Jesus known as the Testimonium Flavianum. Despite this being the oldest description of Jesus written by a non-Christian, scholars have long doubted its authenticity due to the alleged pro-Christian claims it contains. The present book, however, authenticates Josephus’ authorship and then reveals a startling discovery. First, the opening chapters demonstrate that ancient Christians read the Testimonium Flavianum quite differently from modern scholars, considering it to be basically mundane or even vaguely negative, and hence far from the pro-Christian rendering that most scholars have interpreted it to be. This suggests that the Testimonium Flavianum was indeed written by a non-Christian. The book then employs stylometric analysis to demonstrate that the Testimonium Flavianum closely matches Josephus’ style. The Testimonium Flavianum appears, therefore, to be genuinely authored by Josephus. The final chapters explore Josephus’ sources of information about Jesus, revealing a remarkable discovery: Josephus was directly familiar with those who attended the trials of Jesus’ apostles and even those who attended the trial of Jesus himself. The book concludes by describing what Josephus tells us about the Jesus of history, particularly regarding how the stories of Jesus’ miracles and his resurrection developed.