00:00:32:08 - 00:00:33:15
Hi, everyone.

00:00:33:15 - 00:00:36:02
And welcome to Tyndale House’s podcast.

00:00:36:02 - 00:00:39:03
And we have a really special episode today. My name is Peter Williams, I'm

00:00:39:03 - 00:00:41:23
the principal at Tyndale House, and I have a special guest,

00:00:41:23 - 00:00:44:23
Professor and Doctor Thomas C. Schmidt.

00:00:45:04 - 00:00:49:21
And he's going to be talking about a very remarkable book, that, he is,

00:00:50:10 - 00:00:50:23
bringing out.

00:00:50:23 - 00:00:56:10
or just come out and, we're looking forward to conversation together.

00:00:56:10 - 00:01:00:15
So, and we're going to have, two episodes on this topic.

00:01:00:15 - 00:01:04:12
So, just to introduce my guest,

00:01:06:07 - 00:01:08:10
Tom, you've got a new book out

00:01:08:10 - 00:01:11:10
on Josephus and Jesus,

00:01:11:23 - 00:01:14:05
which I think is quite

00:01:14:05 - 00:01:17:05
groundbreaking, and it's making the claim

00:01:17:11 - 00:01:20:15
that Josephus knew people,

00:01:21:12 - 00:01:24:17
who were actually at Jesus's trial.

00:01:25:01 - 00:01:26:17
And that's really stunning.

00:01:26:17 - 00:01:27:18
And we're going to go into that.

00:01:27:18 - 00:01:30:01
But, before we go into that,

00:01:30:01 - 00:01:33:03
why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your academic journey?

00:01:34:07 - 00:01:34:16
Thank you,

00:01:34:16 - 00:01:36:02
Peter.

00:01:36:02 - 00:01:37:08
I guess I could start at the beginning.

00:01:37:08 - 00:01:39:07
I was raised in a Christian family.

00:01:39:07 - 00:01:42:03
I didn't become a Christian, though, until my first year in college.

00:01:42:03 - 00:01:44:08
And there I fell in love with the New Testament.

00:01:44:08 - 00:01:46:09
I couldn't get enough of it.

00:01:46:09 - 00:01:47:21
Night after night, page after page.

00:01:47:21 - 00:01:49:20
I kept reading it, and pretty soon I wanted to

00:01:49:20 - 00:01:51:06
read it in its original language.

00:01:51:06 - 00:01:53:15
So I started taking Greek classes.

00:01:53:15 - 00:01:56:07
I had already signed up for some Latin classes before

00:01:56:07 - 00:01:57:20
I knew it, I was majoring in Latin and Greek.

00:01:57:20 - 00:01:59:13
That's what I took my degree in.

00:01:59:13 - 00:02:02:03
And when I graduated, I married my wife.

00:02:02:03 - 00:02:04:01
And then I taught Greek and Latin,

00:02:04:01 - 00:02:06:05
Latin and a little bit of Greek in the public schools

00:02:06:05 - 00:02:08:12
for a couple of years, did some other things.

00:02:08:12 - 00:02:12:16
And after a while I found myself in Yale's PhD programme.

00:02:13:06 - 00:02:14:15
Like you do. Yep.

00:02:14:15 - 00:02:16:11
Yeah yeah yeah.

00:02:16:11 - 00:02:19:11
And, and, there, you know, I studied Christian history.

00:02:19:21 - 00:02:22:21
I did a lot of philological work, studied several languages.

00:02:22:21 - 00:02:25:06
I was there for about seven years.

00:02:25:06 - 00:02:29:05
Graduated, ever since I've been a professor at Fairfield University.

00:02:29:05 - 00:02:31:13
That's a school in southern Connecticut.

00:02:31:13 - 00:02:35:05
And just last month, I was notified

00:02:35:05 - 00:02:36:23
I've been awarded tenure there.

00:02:36:23 - 00:02:38:10
And, so.

00:02:38:10 - 00:02:41:03
And then, next year, I'll be on leave.

00:02:41:03 - 00:02:45:01
I'll be a visiting fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison programme,

00:02:45:11 - 00:02:48:20
where I'll be, I'll be looking at, the history of Christian persecution

00:02:48:20 - 00:02:50:03
in Persia. P: Wow

00:02:50:03 - 00:02:53:03
But my interests are, they're all over the place.

00:02:53:03 - 00:02:53:21
I love Eastern

00:02:53:21 - 00:02:57:21
Christianity, Christianity in Central Asia, Syriac context, Arabic context.

00:02:58:06 - 00:03:02:10
But I also love the early church, Christian commentaries, early

00:03:02:10 - 00:03:03:04
Christian writers.

00:03:03:04 - 00:03:06:07
But, you know, one of my chief delights is New Testament studies,

00:03:07:03 - 00:03:10:03
the canonical development of the New Testament and of course,

00:03:10:03 - 00:03:11:21
the study of the historical Jesus.

00:03:11:21 - 00:03:15:04
That's what my book is about Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence

00:03:15:12 - 00:03:16:16
for the One Called Christ.

00:03:16:16 - 00:03:20:03
And, may I just say, Peter, that throughout my career,

00:03:20:23 - 00:03:24:21
Tyndale House has been an enormous blessing for me.

00:03:25:03 - 00:03:28:03
The quality of scholarship coming out of it has been fantastic.

00:03:28:10 - 00:03:31:11
Truly, Tyndale is worthy of its name.

00:03:31:11 - 00:03:33:07
So I thank you and so many other people there.

00:03:33:07 - 00:03:34:13
Well, that's great. And,

00:03:35:17 - 00:03:37:07
I can brag on your behalf.

00:03:37:07 - 00:03:42:00
Not only do you read Greek and Latin, but also Hebrew and Syriac and Armenian

00:03:42:06 - 00:03:45:22
and Coptic and Arabic and some more?

00:03:48:01 - 00:03:49:11
that's good, that's good.

00:03:49:11 - 00:03:50:04
Yeah, yeah.

00:03:50:04 - 00:03:52:07
You're going to be modest about it.

00:03:52:07 - 00:03:55:06
So let's dive into this book.

00:03:55:06 - 00:03:59:03
So it's, with Oxford University Press.

00:03:59:18 - 00:04:02:07
I think I've, you know, heard of them,

00:04:02:07 - 00:04:06:06
and, to give it the full title, it's Josephus and Jesus:

00:04:06:09 - 00:04:09:09
New Evidence for the One Called Christ.

00:04:10:13 - 00:04:13:07
And a lot of it is about,

00:04:13:07 - 00:04:17:09
a particular mention that Josephus makes of Jesus.

00:04:17:09 - 00:04:21:04
But first we need to ask ourselves the question, Who is Josephus?

00:04:21:04 - 00:04:24:17
So maybe you can just give us a little bit of, an idea of,

00:04:25:07 - 00:04:27:22
who this guy was.

00:04:27:22 - 00:04:28:03
Yeah.

00:04:28:03 - 00:04:32:09
He's mostly known by most people as a first-century Jewish historian.

00:04:32:23 - 00:04:34:11
But his background is a lot,

00:04:34:11 - 00:04:36:20
it's actually much more complicated.

00:04:36:20 - 00:04:40:17
He was born in Jerusalem in 37 AD

00:04:40:18 - 00:04:43:18
He was raised in an eminent priestly family.

00:04:43:20 - 00:04:45:02
He was also of royal descent.

00:04:45:02 - 00:04:48:02
He became a Pharisee when he was 19 years old.

00:04:48:02 - 00:04:50:11
When he was 20 or 25, he became a priest.

00:04:50:11 - 00:04:52:13
When he was, 30,

00:04:52:13 - 00:04:56:15
he was appointed one of the top generals in the Jewish army against Rome.

00:04:56:15 - 00:04:59:13
And then, after the Jewish army's defeat,

00:04:59:13 - 00:05:03:12
he turned for the last 20, 30 years of his life to writing history.

00:05:03:15 - 00:05:05:13
And, we know him now as a historian.

00:05:05:13 - 00:05:08:10
But he was Pharisee, priest, general and historian.

00:05:08:10 - 00:05:12:15
And, his works are of great significance. It's

00:05:12:15 - 00:05:17:04
he's probably the most important extrabiblical source on New Testament times.

00:05:17:13 - 00:05:21:02
And so, you know, you read his works and New Testament

00:05:21:02 - 00:05:24:14
figures just pour off the pages Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas,

00:05:24:18 - 00:05:28:02
Herodias, Herod the Great, they're all mentioned by Josephus and discussed.

00:05:28:08 - 00:05:33:23
So he's he's invaluable for that and invaluable for the study of early Judaism also.

00:05:33:23 - 00:05:38:13
And just take us really briefly through his, major works or,

00:05:39:16 - 00:05:42:08
the things that he's known for having written.

00:05:42:08 - 00:05:45:17
Yeah, he wrote four books, not nearly of equal length.

00:05:45:17 - 00:05:47:15
He wrote a short autobiography.

00:05:47:15 - 00:05:52:14
He wrote a short, relatively short apology for for Judaism called Against Appian.

00:05:52:19 - 00:05:56:06
But his two major works are The Wars of the Jews,

00:05:56:06 - 00:06:00:02
which talks about the Jewish war with Rome in 66 to 70 AD,

00:06:00:16 - 00:06:05:22
and then his [Jewish] Antiquities, where he he begins from creation and traces

00:06:06:01 - 00:06:10:08
Jewish history, all the way up to right before the Jewish war in 66

00:06:10:08 - 00:06:14:06
AD and, he overlaps, some of these works overlaps.

00:06:14:06 - 00:06:16:19
He'll talk about the same events several times.

00:06:16:19 - 00:06:19:11
So he wrote half a million words, almost.

00:06:19:11 - 00:06:23:22
So, it can be intimidating to dip in, but, if your listeners are interested,

00:06:23:22 - 00:06:24:13
start with book

00:06:24:13 - 00:06:28:08
18 of the Antiquities, where he talks about the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

00:06:28:19 - 00:06:30:08
Read book 5 or 6.

00:06:30:08 - 00:06:32:16
P: Got it here, book 18, right here. T: Fantastic. Yeah.

00:06:34:05 - 00:06:34:11
Yeah.

00:06:34:11 - 00:06:36:06
And we're going to have to dive into book 18.

00:06:36:06 - 00:06:40:11
So just to give it some context, there are 20 books of the Antiquities

00:06:40:11 - 00:06:43:16
which you see is a particularly, big work.

00:06:43:22 - 00:06:46:14
And, we got two mentions of Jesus in that.

00:06:46:14 - 00:06:50:00
And, I'm just going to read, one of them,

00:06:50:15 - 00:06:53:07
and this is what your passage,

00:06:53:07 - 00:06:56:05
your book is particularly about,

00:06:56:05 - 00:06:59:00
where this is what the, the text says,

00:06:59:00 - 00:07:03:11
And obviously it's in Greek, ‘About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man

00:07:03:11 - 00:07:04:14
Indeed.

00:07:04:14 - 00:07:09:02
If indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was one who wrought surprising feats,

00:07:09:09 - 00:07:13:02
and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.

00:07:13:09 - 00:07:16:03
He won over many Jews, and many of the Greeks.

00:07:16:03 - 00:07:17:21
He was the Messiah.

00:07:17:21 - 00:07:22:01
When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest

00:07:22:01 - 00:07:25:19
standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified.

00:07:25:23 - 00:07:27:12
Those who had in the first place

00:07:27:12 - 00:07:30:17
come to love him, did not give up their affection for him.

00:07:30:17 - 00:07:31:14
On the third day

00:07:31:14 - 00:07:35:21
he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied

00:07:35:21 - 00:07:39:22
these and countless other marvellous things about him, and a tribe of Christians

00:07:39:22 - 00:07:44:04
so called after him has still to this day not disappeared.’

00:07:44:04 - 00:07:45:10
Now that's a standard

00:07:45:10 - 00:07:47:09
translation. You've got your own translation

00:07:47:09 - 00:07:50:09
that's going to be a little bit different from that at points.

00:07:50:10 - 00:07:54:04
But as you can see here, we’ve got major Jewish historian

00:07:54:17 - 00:07:59:03
to our reading today saying he's the Christ.

00:07:59:03 - 00:08:01:21
And yet we know Josephus doesn't become a Christian.

00:08:01:21 - 00:08:06:15
Therefore people say, hey, this passage is probably suspect.

00:08:07:09 - 00:08:12:02
And you have got a claim, basically, that the passage can be understood

00:08:12:09 - 00:08:15:22
to be entirely from Josephus and

00:08:17:08 - 00:08:20:08
the second, you know, startlingly claim, that Jesus,

00:08:21:00 - 00:08:24:09
Josephus had a relationship or knew well, people

00:08:24:10 - 00:08:29:05
who were actually at Jesus's trial, and we're going to go, in into that,

00:08:29:05 - 00:08:34:01
particularly, in the second episode, because just just to put that together,

00:08:34:01 - 00:08:38:02
I mean, this is obviously the main things we have about Jesus trial,

00:08:38:15 - 00:08:41:22
are the four Gospels and, now along comes,

00:08:42:22 - 00:08:47:12
Dr Schmidt and is saying that we have, another angle

00:08:47:12 - 00:08:51:16
in on, that which is, rather remarkable.

00:08:51:16 - 00:08:54:16
And I'm sure, people will want to contest that claim, but,

00:08:55:03 - 00:08:59:23
maybe you could just take us through how we should understand this passage.

00:08:59:23 - 00:09:04:01
Well, what made, brought you to the conclusion that it's authentic.

00:09:04:01 - 00:09:07:03
Obviously, there's some people deny it's from Josephus.

00:09:07:03 - 00:09:08:02
The whole lot has been put in.

00:09:08:02 - 00:09:11:22
Some say he said bits, but not this line or that line; didn't say

00:09:11:22 - 00:09:15:00
he was a messiah, for instance, or appeared on the third day.

00:09:16:07 - 00:09:17:22
How how do you come

00:09:17:22 - 00:09:20:22
to come to that and maybe talk us to how you came to these conclusions?

00:09:21:20 - 00:09:24:22
Well, I I'll start off by saying that I,

00:09:25:12 - 00:09:28:23
when I was writing this book, when I first started, I agreed

00:09:28:23 - 00:09:32:07
with the general scholarly consensus that this passage had been

00:09:32:19 - 00:09:34:17
contaminated by Christian scribes

00:09:34:17 - 00:09:35:10
at a later point.

00:09:35:10 - 00:09:37:06
It's your translation that you read.

00:09:37:06 - 00:09:40:16
I mean, it sounds way too pro-Christian, radically

00:09:40:16 - 00:09:43:16
in favour of Jesus to be have written by a non-Christian.

00:09:43:19 - 00:09:45:07
And that's what I believed.

00:09:45:07 - 00:09:48:09
But, I started looking at how

00:09:48:09 - 00:09:51:10
ancient Greek writers treated the passage.

00:09:51:10 - 00:09:53:11
How did they quote it? How did they comment on it?

00:09:53:11 - 00:09:56:19
And I started noticing, in case after case after case that

00:09:56:19 - 00:10:00:00
these ancient and medieval Greek writers were Greek, was their native language.

00:10:00:00 - 00:10:03:04
They didn't seem to be reading it in the same way

00:10:03:04 - 00:10:04:16
that modern scholars are reading it.

00:10:04:16 - 00:10:06:19
They have the same text before them,

00:10:06:19 - 00:10:11:07
but they don't think of it as this amazingly pro-Christian passage.

00:10:11:07 - 00:10:15:07
Some of them even seemed to think it was a little negative towards

00:10:15:07 - 00:10:17:06
Jesus, or could be construed that way.

00:10:17:06 - 00:10:22:14
So that got my curiosity going, and I decided to do as comprehensive

00:10:22:14 - 00:10:25:14
a study as I could of the language in the passage

00:10:25:14 - 00:10:29:05
to see if the language the turns of phrase, the grammar,

00:10:29:10 - 00:10:31:09
if all that was used by Josephus

00:10:31:09 - 00:10:34:21
elsewhere, or if it wasn't, if it's a non-Josephan style.

00:10:35:11 - 00:10:39:23
And I found, using some Greek databases that

00:10:40:20 - 00:10:44:12
I just Josephus’s style just drips off the pages,

00:10:44:12 - 00:10:48:12
you know, every turn of phrase, every grammatical construction,

00:10:48:12 - 00:10:51:21
the word frequency levels, they all are comparable to Josephus.

00:10:51:21 - 00:10:57:04
You can find just a flood of parallels throughout Josephus’s work.

00:10:57:04 - 00:11:01:19
So in other words, it looks like this style of Josephus.

00:11:01:19 - 00:11:05:12
The phrases are used by him elsewhere many times,

00:11:06:09 - 00:11:11:07
and what's interesting is that if you look at how Josephus uses

00:11:11:07 - 00:11:14:23
the same words and phrases elsewhere, you see that

00:11:15:05 - 00:11:21:02
there, these phrases aren't as positive as scholars

00:11:21:02 - 00:11:25:04
have traditionally considered them to be, and sometimes they're even negative.

00:11:25:16 - 00:11:28:14
And and that explains why those Greek writers

00:11:28:14 - 00:11:31:15
were reading the passage differently, because they knew the Greek language.

00:11:31:15 - 00:11:33:17
They knew these words are a bit more ambiguous.

00:11:33:17 - 00:11:38:08
So I propose, I think, a more, a more well-calibrated translation

00:11:38:08 - 00:11:43:02
that considers how Josephus uses these phrases elsewhere, and the passage

00:11:43:02 - 00:11:46:23
doesn't come across as nearly, positive about Jesus.

00:11:46:23 - 00:11:50:11
And it actually can be a bit negative about him as well.

00:11:51:02 - 00:11:51:12
Okay.

00:11:51:12 - 00:11:55:01
So let's, go into that, one of the things I was fascinated by,

00:11:55:08 - 00:11:59:15
in your book and, just remind me how many pages your book is in,

00:12:00:20 - 00:12:01:23
in print.

00:12:01:23 - 00:12:04:04
Yeah. I think it's 330, I think. Okay.

00:12:04:04 - 00:12:07:21
So it's a substantial book, is you've got a table of,

00:12:08:07 - 00:12:12:02
word frequency where obviously there are 89

00:12:12:09 - 00:12:15:09
words in the standard Greek text of this passage.

00:12:15:20 - 00:12:18:10
And the rarest word or the word that doesn't

00:12:18:10 - 00:12:21:10
occur in Josephus elsewhere is the word Christian.

00:12:21:10 - 00:12:25:00
And then in a sense, you dial up from there to the more frequent words.

00:12:25:05 - 00:12:28:06
And we'll actually talk about some of these specific words.

00:12:28:11 - 00:12:33:05
But basically you're finding there's a correlation where,

00:12:34:08 - 00:12:37:08
the rare words,

00:12:37:10 - 00:12:39:07
within

00:12:39:07 - 00:12:44:00
the language more generally, are rarer in Josephus, but the ones that are

00:12:44:00 - 00:12:48:16
most frequent in the passage also correspond pretty amazingly

00:12:48:20 - 00:12:54:00
with frequency that he has, within, his own writings.

00:12:54:00 - 00:12:58:13
And perhaps if we can even name some Greek words, with that, and you could just

00:12:58:21 - 00:13:02:07
talk us through that so that people can see your argument a bit more depth.

00:13:03:09 - 00:13:04:01
Yeah.

00:13:04:01 - 00:13:08:00
One of the criticisms of the passage by previous scholars was that

00:13:08:05 - 00:13:12:15
there's some words in the passage that are rare in Josephus.

00:13:12:15 - 00:13:15:14
You know, he has a massive corpus of almost half a million words.

00:13:15:14 - 00:13:18:19
So we have a great sample size of how Josephus liked to use

00:13:18:23 - 00:13:21:04
deploy certain vocabulary items.

00:13:21:04 - 00:13:24:09
And this passage has several words that are rare.

00:13:24:09 - 00:13:25:21
One word that's even unique.

00:13:25:21 - 00:13:27:09
He doesn't use it anywhere else.

00:13:27:09 - 00:13:31:08
And those were previously thought of markers of inauthenticity

00:13:31:12 - 00:13:34:19
that this is indicators that Christians had interpolated the passage.

00:13:35:04 - 00:13:39:09
But what I show is when you when you rank all his vocabulary

00:13:39:17 - 00:13:42:15
and you look at how frequently he will use rare words,

00:13:42:15 - 00:13:45:17
it turns out that he has this enormous vocabulary.

00:13:45:17 - 00:13:49:06
I mean, it's just astonishing how large his vocabulary is,

00:13:49:12 - 00:13:51:20
to the point that he uses a unique word.

00:13:51:20 - 00:13:54:21
So he deploys a word he doesn't use anywhere else.

00:13:54:21 - 00:13:58:21
In half a million words, he deploys a unique word about every like

00:13:58:22 - 00:14:03:19
87 words, and the passage is 89 or 90 words long.

00:14:04:03 - 00:14:08:00
So you would expect him to use a unique word.

00:14:08:00 - 00:14:12:07
And that's just what he does is, he does use a word.

00:14:12:07 - 00:14:15:00
The unique word happens to be the word Christian.

00:14:15:00 - 00:14:18:08
So what other word would you expect he uses when he's talking about Jesus,

00:14:18:08 - 00:14:19:15
who is called the Christ?

00:14:19:15 - 00:14:25:09
And I show that that frequency rate, I show that, it's the same in in a passage.

00:14:25:09 - 00:14:25:21
In other words,

00:14:25:21 - 00:14:30:08
that if we took a random passage of 90 words of similar length elsewhere,

00:14:30:14 - 00:14:34:19
we would find the same amount of rare words, the same number of common words.

00:14:34:19 - 00:14:38:19
Common words aren't used too frequently, rare words aren't used to infrequently.

00:14:38:22 - 00:14:42:04
It all matches and the field of forensic authorship

00:14:42:04 - 00:14:44:21
analysis has been doing this kind of thing for years.

00:14:44:21 - 00:14:48:07
And, what this shows is that really there's

00:14:48:09 - 00:14:50:23
there's nothing in terms of the use of vocabulary.

00:14:50:23 - 00:14:54:04
There's nothing in the passage that is odd.

00:14:54:10 - 00:14:58:01
It all looks Josephan in terms of frequency level.

00:14:58:20 - 00:15:03:01
Now, your book is available from Oxford University Press.

00:15:03:01 - 00:15:06:02
Hard copy, but also available electronically.

00:15:06:20 - 00:15:10:03
And is is, how does one get it electronically?

00:15:10:22 - 00:15:13:22
there was, a an anonymous donor

00:15:13:22 - 00:15:16:06
approached me and wanted to make the book available for free.

00:15:16:06 - 00:15:20:17
So it's it's available for free online at josephusandjesus.com.

00:15:20:22 - 00:15:23:00
It'll be up there by mid-summer.

00:15:23:00 - 00:15:25:19
And, you can also buy a hardcover copy.

00:15:25:19 - 00:15:28:18
It's it's academic pricing, so it'll be quite expensive.

00:15:28:18 - 00:15:33:22
But please avail yourself of the of the free copy at josephusandjesus.com.

00:15:34:03 - 00:15:35:14
Wow, that's really great.

00:15:35:14 - 00:15:38:18
So people can follow you get down into the detail.

00:15:39:09 - 00:15:43:21
And then, this other thing about the passage,

00:15:43:21 - 00:15:48:20
not being as Christian as it sounds to us, so can we go into that?

00:15:48:20 - 00:15:51:15
Because obviously there is the fact that he,

00:15:52:18 - 00:15:55:07
Josephus, uses the word

00:15:55:07 - 00:15:59:01
Christ of him and talks about appearances on the third day.

00:15:59:18 - 00:16:03:03
Maybe you could take us into those and anything else that you think's worthwhile

00:16:03:03 - 00:16:06:03
where people have found it to be,

00:16:06:22 - 00:16:09:15
a particularly Christian sounding passage.

00:16:09:15 - 00:16:10:07
Yeah. Right.

00:16:10:07 - 00:16:13:20
So the two major criticisms of that, it doesn't have Josephus’s style.

00:16:13:21 - 00:16:15:07
We've we've talked about that already.

00:16:15:07 - 00:16:16:22
I don't think that's a valid criticism.

00:16:16:22 - 00:16:19:22
But the second is that the claims of the passage are just

00:16:20:13 - 00:16:23:13
don't sound like they come from a non-Christian.

00:16:23:13 - 00:16:26:13
when you do a close reading of the Greek text, though,

00:16:26:21 - 00:16:30:17
those those phrases that in your translation sounded like

00:16:30:17 - 00:16:31:14
they come from a Christian,

00:16:31:14 - 00:16:34:20
that Jesus appeared alive on the third day, that he works these

00:16:34:20 - 00:16:38:19
I think your your translation said astounding or amazing things or something like that.

00:16:38:19 - 00:16:41:11
P: Yeah. Marvellous. Yeah, yeah. T: Marvellous.

00:16:41:11 - 00:16:42:12
You see that

00:16:42:12 - 00:16:45:17
actually, these passages suggest other interpretations.

00:16:45:17 - 00:16:50:23
That word for for marvelous feats is the Greek word paradoxa.

00:16:51:18 - 00:16:55:12
And this, Greek has a very rich vocabulary.

00:16:55:12 - 00:16:57:17
They have many words for miracles and [INSERT GREEK WORD]

00:16:57:17 - 00:16:58:09
is one

00:16:58:09 - 00:17:03:00
that's used for like where you've got some kind of questions about that.

00:17:03:00 - 00:17:07:06
And, and I think the questions are more, you know, moral questions is

00:17:07:06 - 00:17:10:02
where is this power coming from? It's a little uncertain.

00:17:10:02 - 00:17:13:20
Josephus uses that same word to describe the miracles

00:17:13:20 - 00:17:17:15
of Pharaoh's magicians, for instance, and that that that passage

00:17:17:15 - 00:17:20:15
also has other parallels with the paragraph on Jesus.

00:17:20:18 - 00:17:25:09
So, that's one example where in English this sounds really positive.

00:17:25:09 - 00:17:26:15
In Greek, not so much.

00:17:26:15 - 00:17:31:10
Another example with the resurrection is just a simple grammatical observation.

00:17:31:10 - 00:17:36:22
That's the Greek word phainomai can mean appear, which is what Josephus uses.

00:17:36:22 - 00:17:38:10
He appeared to them alive.

00:17:38:10 - 00:17:42:05
It can also mean ‘seem’, like, he seemed to them

00:17:42:05 - 00:17:45:06
to be alive, or he appeared to them to be alive.

00:17:45:06 - 00:17:49:20
In other words, with that understanding, the passage is just saying

00:17:49:20 - 00:17:52:20
that the disciples thought Jesus was alive on the third day, which,

00:17:53:07 - 00:17:56:07
is something that non-Christians could freely admit.

00:17:56:17 - 00:18:00:04
And I showed that that the grammatical structure of that

00:18:00:09 - 00:18:03:09
sentence is used by Josephus elsewhere.

00:18:03:10 - 00:18:07:15
And in that same structure he clearly means ‘seem’

00:18:07:15 - 00:18:10:10
he doesn't mean definitely appeared physically.

00:18:10:10 - 00:18:14:05
So, and that, I think, is how early Greek writers read the passage,

00:18:14:05 - 00:18:17:13
because many of them don't seem to think it confesses the resurrection.

00:18:18:00 - 00:18:21:09
And, there's a number of observations I make that, that

00:18:21:22 - 00:18:23:21
alter the understanding of the passage.

00:18:23:21 - 00:18:26:21
So that and I think it calibrates it to Josephus’s,

00:18:27:09 - 00:18:29:15
style much more closely.

00:18:29:15 - 00:18:33:21
And the passage then doesn't, doesn't come across as too Christian sounding.

00:18:33:22 - 00:18:35:13
You mentioned, Christ. Right.

00:18:35:13 - 00:18:37:01
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:37:01 - 00:18:40:01
So so that's another big one where he says, he was the Christ.

00:18:40:01 - 00:18:41:03
And of course,

00:18:41:03 - 00:18:44:08
if you're a first century Jew and you say Jesus is the Christ and you're

00:18:44:08 - 00:18:48:03
also a Christian, you can't really, that's what a Christian is is you confess Jesus

00:18:48:03 - 00:18:49:08
is the Christ. But,

00:18:51:01 - 00:18:53:23
that's what the Greek textual witnesses say.

00:18:53:23 - 00:19:00:10
But there's an early, Latin translation and there's an early Syriac translation.

00:19:00:10 - 00:19:04:23
There's also an Arabic translation that that's in a third, a second tier witness.

00:19:05:07 - 00:19:06:22
And these are united.

00:19:06:22 - 00:19:08:15
The Latin and the Syriac are united.

00:19:08:15 - 00:19:12:12
And they don't say that, that Jesus is the Christ or was the Christ.

00:19:12:12 - 00:19:16:14
They say he was thought to be the Christ, or he was believed to be the Christ.

00:19:16:23 - 00:19:20:12
And these translations are not, copying off of one another.

00:19:20:12 - 00:19:23:12
They clearly are independently going back to Greek manuscripts.

00:19:23:21 - 00:19:28:06
So, I think that that is the original reading.

00:19:28:13 - 00:19:33:01
This also happens to match how Josephus talks about Jesus elsewhere

00:19:33:09 - 00:19:37:09
in his, one other reference to Jesus, where he says he was called the Christ.

00:19:37:15 - 00:19:40:04
The Latin and Syriac match that where they say

00:19:40:04 - 00:19:43:13
he was thought to be, or somehow considered to be the Christ.

00:19:43:13 - 00:19:44:21
So with that understanding,

00:19:44:21 - 00:19:48:15
it's again just he's just communicating what people called Jesus.

00:19:49:03 - 00:19:49:19
Yeah.

00:19:49:19 - 00:19:51:23
Well, I mean, that's really remarkable.

00:19:51:23 - 00:19:52:18
And so,

00:19:53:22 - 00:19:56:22
what does that make you think then,

00:19:57:13 - 00:20:01:09
overall about the significance of Josephus,

00:20:02:03 - 00:20:04:23
his testimony about Jesus,

00:20:04:23 - 00:20:07:16
as we understand it today?

00:20:07:16 - 00:20:10:16
I mean, I think, I think it means that

00:20:10:19 - 00:20:15:08
Josephus talks about Jesus in ways that remarkably parallel

00:20:15:15 - 00:20:18:09
the synoptic Gospels and the gospel of John.

00:20:18:09 - 00:20:21:09
He puts Jesus under the reign of Pontius Pilate,

00:20:21:11 - 00:20:23:17
the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

00:20:23:17 - 00:20:28:19
He, while Caiaphas was high priest, he says he had many disciples.

00:20:28:19 - 00:20:33:05
He says that he worked miracles, providing that we understand that word with,

00:20:33:05 - 00:20:34:08
you know, the appropriate

00:20:34:08 - 00:20:37:16
suspicion that Josephus accords to it, to moral suspicion.

00:20:38:03 - 00:20:41:03
But that agrees with the gospel accounts, the Jewish leaders,

00:20:41:05 - 00:20:42:18
they did think he'd worked miracles.

00:20:42:18 - 00:20:45:17
They just thought that he was using Beelzebub or something like that.

00:20:46:19 - 00:20:47:06
He

00:20:47:06 - 00:20:50:11
affirms that the the apostles, the disciples,

00:20:51:12 - 00:20:55:16
did believe Jesus was resurrected on the third day, that this wasn't

00:20:56:00 - 00:20:59:22
something that developed decades or generations later.

00:20:59:22 - 00:21:04:21
This was a very early Christian belief that Josephus acknowledges.

00:21:05:08 - 00:21:10:19
And so I think that he provides fantastic light on the on the Jesus of history.

00:21:11:08 - 00:21:16:08
Now, what will people reply to your book?

00:21:16:08 - 00:21:17:13
Obviously it's it's early days.

00:21:17:13 - 00:21:20:13
You've got some great commendations from serious scholars for your work.

00:21:21:14 - 00:21:23:23
But, everything is contested.

00:21:23:23 - 00:21:27:06
So, scholars are going to come, back at you.

00:21:28:01 - 00:21:32:02
What do you think are the strongest points they could make against your argument?

00:21:34:02 - 00:21:36:10
When I've presented at conferences on this,

00:21:36:10 - 00:21:39:12
they've brought up the — The thing that gets brought

00:21:39:12 - 00:21:43:07
and has brought up several times is that, it's not the style of the passage.

00:21:43:07 - 00:21:45:20
It's not the the content of the passage.

00:21:45:20 - 00:21:48:03
It's the position of the passage that the passage

00:21:48:03 - 00:21:51:21
just doesn't fit in the Antiquities where it's located.

00:21:51:21 - 00:21:54:06
Looks like it's been inserted.

00:21:54:06 - 00:21:56:00
And I do address that in the book.

00:21:56:00 - 00:21:59:00
I think it actually fits remarkably well.

00:21:59:16 - 00:22:01:18
It matches some Jewish traditions.

00:22:01:18 - 00:22:07:02
There's adjacent stories, that that Jewish traditions about Jesus, show

00:22:07:02 - 00:22:10:21
how the story fits in with, with those two passages and so forth.

00:22:11:04 - 00:22:14:14
I think that's one thing that that people will, will, will use.

00:22:15:12 - 00:22:18:09
I think another is that,

00:22:19:14 - 00:22:23:05
it's going to be hard for people to unlearn how to see a passage

00:22:23:05 - 00:22:28:03
they're so used to seeing translated in this wildly pro-Christian way.

00:22:28:11 - 00:22:31:21
And I offer a translation that I think is much fairer to it.

00:22:32:19 - 00:22:38:01
And I think that that people are going to, they might struggle with that.

00:22:38:01 - 00:22:41:08
They're also going to struggle with, I've heard this several times also that

00:22:41:23 - 00:22:45:02
people will say, he should have said more about Jesus.

00:22:45:02 - 00:22:47:15
He should have said more. Why did he only say 90 words?

00:22:47:15 - 00:22:50:15
He should have had pages and pages about Jesus.

00:22:50:18 - 00:22:54:07
To which, you know, I would say, you know, it sounds like you're talking

00:22:54:07 - 00:22:57:23
like a 21st century person who's more interested in Jesus than Josephus was.

00:22:58:15 - 00:23:03:05
You know, he he would have had ample reason to to say what he did.

00:23:03:12 - 00:23:06:07
You know, he's writing at a time when the Jewish people are divided

00:23:06:07 - 00:23:09:07
about Jesus, you know, that there's a lot of uncertainty about who he is.

00:23:09:15 - 00:23:13:01
So he would have had many reasons to not try and stir up a hornet's nest

00:23:13:01 - 00:23:14:07
or to say something briefly.

00:23:14:07 - 00:23:17:22
Christianity was controversial to the Graeco-Romans as well.

00:23:17:22 - 00:23:19:09
And they’re part of his audience.

00:23:19:09 - 00:23:22:14
So, there's many reasons why he may not have

00:23:22:14 - 00:23:25:17
wanted to dwell overmuch on on

00:23:25:17 - 00:23:26:18
Jesus.

00:23:26:18 - 00:23:27:15
Yeah. That's great.

00:23:27:15 - 00:23:30:23
Well, in the next episode, we will go a little bit more into the chronology,

00:23:30:23 - 00:23:35:03
particularly of, of Josephus, and his relationship with Jesus.

00:23:35:03 - 00:23:36:00
I think we're going to,

00:23:36:23 - 00:23:39:15
of course, see the,

00:23:39:15 - 00:23:42:00
Josephus is born,

00:23:42:00 - 00:23:45:07
after, the time of the events of Jesus ministry.

00:23:45:07 - 00:23:47:22
So that's something we just need to make clear.

00:23:47:22 - 00:23:50:22
So he's close from one perspective.

00:23:51:08 - 00:23:54:12
But, he's not an eyewitness himself but we're going to see

00:23:54:12 - 00:23:57:12
in the next episode that he knew people who did,

00:23:58:07 - 00:23:59:06
meet Jesus.

00:23:59:06 - 00:24:03:05
So very, very grateful to, Tom Schmidt for making his time available.

00:24:04:03 - 00:24:07:09
I encourage you to go to his website.

00:24:07:09 - 00:24:10:18
And, maybe you could just give us the URL for that.

00:24:11:00 - 00:24:15:17
P: As we end and to see that T: yes, it's josephusandjesus.com

00:24:16:01 - 00:24:20:21
josephusandjesus.com and there you can see more of that book.

00:24:20:21 - 00:24:24:02
And of course, you should, follow our own,

00:24:24:14 - 00:24:28:17
Tyndale House podcast, rate review and, share widely.

00:24:28:17 - 00:24:32:05
And this particular story is really worth sharing widely.

00:24:32:05 - 00:24:34:22
So thank you very much, Tom, and looking forward to the next episode.