Schmidt, T. C. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford University Press, 2025.

About six months ago, I found myself hurtling down the rabbit hole of Josephus and the famous Testimoniun Flavianum (TF): his paragraph-long commentary on Jesus of Nazareth that many scholars have thought to be interpolated by a Christian scribe.

You see, I had been doing a slow read through Eusebius, one of the authors who preserves the TF in the form we know it. It had dawned on me that this preservation means the TF is quite old indeed. If tampering happened, it was not the work of some bored or overzealous Irish monk deep in the Middle Ages. The list of possible suspects was actually quite narrow: either Eusebius himself (c. 315) or his academic forerunner Origen (d. 253)—or someone even earlier. Knowing Origen, Eusebius, their scholarly methodologies, and their intellectual reflexes, they struck me as rather dubious candidates for textual hijinks. They are figures who are much more interested—one might even say obsessed—with collecting and presenting relevant data, even when there is no clean ideological or theological desideratum.

So the forgery/interpolation angle was looking curiouser and curiouser to me, hence the aforementioned spelunking-of-rabbit-hole. And then, while digging around the interwebs, I discovered that a new big book was coming out in May from OUP that was poised to solve this old puzzle.

The book would argue that the TF was, in the main, real.

I was intrigued. But I must admit, dear reader, I had serious doubts that one monograph could really live up to what I suspected was an overly enthusiastic blurb designed to sell copies. The TF is such a classic problem in ancient history, and with no new sources, fragments, or evidentiary inputs, it just seemed highly improbable that anyone could make much of a dent.

Well, I am here to say that I think the book, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by T. C. Schmidt, does indeed deliver the goods. One wants to avoid hyperbole here: I’m not an expert on Josephus per se, and it will take some time for those who are to digest Schmidt’s case and offer whatever pushbacks are warranted. Even so, were I prejudicially opposed to the book’s findings—in fact, I must confess quite the opposite; this book pleases many of my priors—I’d be at a loss for where to begin mounting a meaningful counter argument.

Schmidt divides the project into two parts. Part One handles the authenticity of the TF itself, considering the textual and philological case for the paragraph’s authenticity. Part Two considers the prosopography of Josephus’ first-century Palestine, exploring his social network to uncover probable links to the trial of Jesus.

Foregoing the more conventional book review format, let me mark just two items that stood out to me about Part One. At the outset, Schmidt hooks readers by showing that most ancient and medieval reception of the TF found it to be a fairly unremarkable comment on Jesus. Unlike virtually all English readers today, the earlier readers did not think that Josephus was a particularly friendly witness toward Jesus.

For those who study this kind of material, this unexpected finding is “blood in the water,” a sign that there is some serious disconnect between the modern and premodern reflexive readings. It is also here that Schmidt makes a fairly persuasive case that the original version of the TF probably looked a little different than the one that survives in our Greek manuscripts.

But, secondly, the book really made me sit up and take notice when Schmidt begins delving into the actual resonance of Josephus’ Greek. The most striking example was his analysis of paradoxa: Josephus claims that Jesus was a “doer of miraculous deeds” (paradoxōn ergōn poiētēs). At which point, many post-Enlightenment scholars say to themselves, “By gum, Josephus seems very much in bag for Jesus.” After all, if Josephus acknowledged “miracles,” that seems to authenticate Jesus’ standing, which raises questions about why Josephus is clearly not much of a Christian elsewhere in his corpus—and we’re off to the races with the interpolation theory.

This is not how ancient people thought about “the miraculous,” however. Sorcerers could perform miracles; false prophets could perform miracles; demons could perform miracles. To the ancient mind, not all paradoxa were done by God and his authentic agents, as the Bible itself indicates (see Ex. 7:11–12; Matt. 9:34). For the ancient historian who knows anything about religion or magic, Schmidt’s argument is remarkably intuitive at this point. Indeed, as the book goes on to argue for other aspects of the TF, what sounds like Josephus’ praise in English translation is often far more ambiguous or even subtly hostile in Greek. In Schmidt’s reading, Josephus thought Jesus was a something of a showman who pleased the audience and trafficked in trite moral truisms.

After making his philological case in Part One, Schmidt turns to Josephus’ network of associates in Jerusalem and Judea in Part Two. The argument here is simple: Josephus knew the movers and shakers of the most upper crust Jewish aristocrats in the mid-first century. He clearly had been one himself prior to the Great Revolt. While there is no “smoking gun,” Schmidt persuaded this reader that it was quite likely that Josephus personally knew figures—various candidates are considered, such as the family of Herod—who had been involved in the trial of Jesus from a few decades earlier.

That is to say, Josephus was well informed about Jesus—better informed certainly than, say, other early non-Christian witnesses such as Tacitus and Pliny. (Here, I was somewhat startled that no one seems to have made this connection before, and I still have historiographical questions as to why it appears to have drawn little interest until now, which calls for closer attention to Schmidt’s ample footnotes.) And while it was not his intention to play corroborative witness to Christianity, the portrait Josephus paints is still remarkably consonant with the traditional story one finds in the NT itself, which Schmidt explores near the book’s end.

I myself should close by making a methodological observation: Schmidt’s work shows the power of certain digital tools. Without them, he would have needed decades of extensive notetaking to have mounted the same kind of argument, and no sane scholar would have undertaken such a project. Instead, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae can comb through hundreds of texts in seconds. For example, if you want exhaustive knowledge on how Josephus applies the term paradoxa, you no longer have to read through all his works, note every occurrence, and pray you don’t miss one; you can simply plug in the word, compare the relevant passages, and then spend the remaining time comparing with other occurrences in Greek literature. In the near future, one expects that AI will be paired with some of these searches to make some of these steps even more efficient. As more and more databases come online and grow, the more precise our readings can be.

And that’s exciting for ancient historians, classicists, biblical scholars, and theologians who work in original languages. Not infrequently, the meaning of crucial but apparently ambiguous passages creates interpretational impasses. (I’ve written about another classic one here.) With some of these new tools becoming increasingly standard in the research of younger scholars and upcoming grad students, I think we are going to see more breakthroughs.

It might, however, be a while before we see another one as significant as Schmidt’s appears to be.