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So welcome to the

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Tyndale House podcast, my name is Peter Williams, Principal at Tyndale House.

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And, glad to be your host today and very glad

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to have a special guest, Professor Tom Schmidt.

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Back for a second

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blast, let's say, of his really phenomenal

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new book, on Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence [For the One they Call Christ].

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So it's really, something that we, were looking at last episode, how,

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Josephus, this

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early Christian, historian, actually writes about Jesus

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in two passages and one of those has been disputed for many years.

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And Professor Schmidt, Tom, has made an argument that actually,

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the words really do come from, Josephus.

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And so that's really, great.

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And, Tom, why don't you just tell us a little bit,

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introducing your book, some people may not have got the first episode.

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Tell us what your book’s about.

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And then we're going to dive into Josephus actually knowing people

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who had met Jesus.

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So let's, just start off with your book in general.

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Yeah.

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The book, the title is Josephus and Jesus New Evidence for the One Called Christ.

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Josephus is a Jewish historian.

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He wrote in the first century, late first century, and he mentions Jesus.

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But the passage is very controversial.

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Most scholars think it's been doctored

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or interpolated, contaminated by later Christian scribes.

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So my book, I try to see if I can authenticate the passage,

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which we talked about last episode, which I think I do, successfully.

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And then in part two, I try to trace out Josephus’s

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pathways of knowledge about Jesus.

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How did he learn about Jesus? Where is he getting his information from?

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And that's where I, I show that Josephus was, was, it turns out,

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intimately connected with those who were associated with Jesus's trial.

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So you've got a 300

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page or plus, Oxford University Press book

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that people can also freely download which is very enlightened.

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And that will go into some of the technicalities we've already seen,

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you make an argument that the style fits with the style of Josephus

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and, just to remind people of what this, passage says.

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So it's in Josephus’s big work

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The[ Jewish] Antiquities, 20 books of of that history of the Jews.

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And in Book 18,

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so as we're getting near to the end, he talks about

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a man, ‘about this time there lived

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Jesus, a wise man, if one should, ought to call him a man.

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For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher

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of many of such people as accept the truth gladly.

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He won over many Jews and many Greeks.

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He was the Messiah.

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When Pilot, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us.

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(And that's a phrase we're going to come back to in

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this episode) men of the highest standing amongst us,

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had condemned him to be crucified,

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those who had in the first place come to love him

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did not give up their affection for him.

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On the third day he appeared to them restored to life,

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for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous

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things about him. And the tribe of Christians so-called after him,

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has still to this day not disappeared.’

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So it sounds in that translation that I was reading, which is not Tom's

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translation, it's the Loeb translation.

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So, you can go and get that. It’s quite a standard translation.

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Sounds more Christian, than it actually is.

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Tom argues that it's,

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some of those phrases have been a bit overegged in translations.

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And one of the things you do in your book

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that's fascinating is to sort of map out,

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Josephus’s LinkedIn profile,

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I suppose. You know, who he knew,

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and how that affects how we should read this stuff.

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So why don't you take us through that argument?

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Josephus, I mean, it turns out, was a man of enormous

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interpersonal connections in first-century Jerusalem.

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He was from an eminent priestly family.

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He was a priest.

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His father and mother were of royal descent.

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His father was of high priestly descent, and he was rubbing shoulders

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with the best and brightest of his age, and those

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who were older than him from a very young age.

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And, he, you know, he talks about meeting the chief priests.

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He knew high priests.

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He knew the head of the Sanhedrin.

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He knew members of the Herodian dynasty.

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He met the Empress. He met the Emperor.

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I mean, this guy was as connected as you can get.

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But he also was stationed in Galilee for three years during the Jewish War.

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And, your listeners will recognize this.

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He visited places like Capernaum, Cana in Galilee,

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Tiberius.

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He went he was stationed in Sepphoris, which was three miles

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down the road from Nazareth.

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So he has, spending his life,

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He's born in 37 AD in Jerusalem, growing up

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in Jerusalem in the 30s, 40s and 50s, stationed in Galilee

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later on. He's he's literally spending his whole life

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where Jesus had ministered just one, two, three decades before.

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So it's at least plausible that he would encounter people who who knew Jesus.

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But I, I try in my book in in chapters five and six to show why

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actually, I think that that we can show that he did

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he did know people who who knew Jesus.

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Why don't you take us into that argument?

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Well, if you read the paragraph,

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his testimony about Jesus, it's called the Testimonium Flavianum.

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If you read that paragraph carefully, he says it was the first men

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who accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate,

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and that that word, first men is prōtoi in Greek.

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And if you read with care, you see that in Josephus’s autobiography

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He says repeatedly that he knew the prōtoi in Jerusalem.

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He met them.

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In fact, he says in 51 or 52 AD,

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he was continually meeting with the chief priests and the prōtoi

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And, it's just simple logic to conclude that, I mean,

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if 20 years previously, Josephus says in 30 AD, 33 AD,

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the first men accused Jesus, and then 20 years later,

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Josephus is saying that I knew the first men.

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It's only reasonable to conclude that he probably knew

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some of the people who were part of the trial of Jesus.

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But that's not everything he says.

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He says that, not that it was the first men

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that was the first men among us who, who accused Jesus.

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And that phrase par’ hēmin in Greek,

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Josephus loves that phrase, he uses it 50 other times.

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The question is, what does he mean?

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Does he mean like just a generic, you know, first men of the Jews?

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Is that what that means, or is he trying to indicate a closer relationship?

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And I think when you look at the dozens of times he uses

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that phrase, it's clear that that this is meant to mark

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a direct personal interaction, a direct knowledge of something.

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To put it simply,

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he's claiming to have known some of these first men,

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and given his background, that's very plausible.

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I mean, he knew the chief priests and the high priests in the Sanhedrin.

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These are people associated with with the the trial of Jesus in the Gospels.

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So in part, I lay that foundation and that,

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I think, gets us to a reasonable amount of probability.

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But, in, in chapter six, like you said, I, I do the, the LinkedIn Facebook thing

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where I track Josephus’s social network and I try to actually find names of people

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who were, at the trial of Jesus or reasonably could be expected

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to be at the trial of Jesus, whom Josephus also knew and, that's

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where I, I there's some really, remarkable stuff that comes out of this.

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Josephus is very well connected.

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Probably the best candidate for someone

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whom Josephus knew who is at the trial of Jesus,

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is Josephus’s own commander in the Jewish war.

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His, Josephus was one of seven generals in the Jewish War.

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And then there were two supreme

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commanders, and one of them is his name is Ananus the second.

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And he was a high priest in 62 AD he was very old.

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Josephus says three times,

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He was the oldest of the chief priests in 69 AD.

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so this guy would have been in his 30s or 40s when Jesus was crucified.

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And it turns out that Ananus

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the second’s brother-in-law, was Caiaphas,

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the man who had Jesus crucified, the high priest and his his father

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was Annas, the high priest, who also was involved in the trial of Jesus.

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Yeah.

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So we've already got like Josephus’s commander was was the son

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and brother-in-law of the gentlemen who, who who accused Jesus before Pilate.

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And so, so just to dig down there.

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So Ananus and Annas are very similar names.

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They’re sort of related one partly different ways of rendering the same name

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Hannan in Greek.

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And one of

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the points you make that’s fascinating is that, of course,

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Jesus is, the trial is on the eve of Passover,

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and that's when you're supposed to be at your dad's house.

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So when you've got Jesus going to Annas’s house

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in the record of the trial, then guess who is going to be there?

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You know, everyone's,

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gathered together at that time.

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And so it's almost inevitable that,

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this man who is Josephus’s boss

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at one stage was actually at the trial,

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and, you go into that and some, some other sort of candidates as well.

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Do you want to talk through those? Yes.

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There's several other candidates.

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If you read, the book of Acts in the early chapters,

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Gamaliel.

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Rabbi Gamaliel, he presides over the trial of the apostles.

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yeah, we say Gamaliel in my my country, but that's fine.

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Gamaliel. Yeah.

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And and he, we know him from the Jewish Mishnah and Talmud.

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He was the head of the Sanhedrin.

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Peter says you crucified.

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You murdered Jesus.

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So Gamaliel clearly had a hand in the trial.

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Josephus knows he, the son of Gamaliel.

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He knows his son.

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And so we can say the same thing about, Simon is his name,

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about about Simon, as we can about Josephus’s commander.

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That in 30 AD

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on the Passover, according to Jewish law, these men who are known to Josephus,

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would have been required to be in Jerusalem, where Jesus was.

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They would have been required

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to be in the house of their father celebrating Passover.

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And where was Jesus brought?

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The Gospels say he was brought into the house

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of Annas, the father of Josephus’s commander.

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Exactly where in the same time, same place where Josephus’s

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commander was supposed to have been in accordance with Old Testament law.

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And, we can say the same thing, a similar thing about Josephus’s

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acquaintance Simon.

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He would have been in the house

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of his father, Gamaliel, while he was called to the trial of Jesus.

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We can't be certain if Simon followed him there.

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He probably would have been an adult.

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He, Simon became the leader of the Sanhedrin later on.

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So he would have had very good reasons to be at the Sanhedrin trial.

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But nevertheless, his his his acquaintance Simon would have seen his father

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coming and going to the trial of Jesus that night.

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T: And there's other candidates, too, you know P: Let's let's keep going.

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I mean, people are going to want to follow up these leads.

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So, so, yeah.

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P: You got another one? T: He knew a high priest named Joshua.

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He was one of the high priests. You know, there's only,

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like, 15 high priests between, you know, 30 AD and 70 AD.

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So the fact that Josephus knows two or three of these guys is quite remarkable.

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And he even calls the high priest Joshua

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his friend.

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He was quite close with him. And,

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Joshua

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married into an illustrious high priestly family.

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He became high priest himself.

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And, and again, you know, the trial of Jesus, the Gospels

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say that all the chief priests were there, that the all the Sanhedrin was there.

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We know from the Mishnah and the Talmud that at a trial of a false prophet,

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which is what Jesus was accused of, that the entire Sanhedrin was required

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to be present.

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And, this happened in Jerusalem on the Passover, where all,

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all, faithful Jews were supposed to be present anyway.

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So so, we have very good reasons for suspecting that

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Joshua would have been called to the trial of Jesus.

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Certainly have known about it, have known all about it while it was happening.

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There's other candidates, too.

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These are not quite as likely, but they're still

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they're still quite intriguing. For me,

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my favourite of the remaining is, you know, the famous story

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of the daughter of Herodias who is dancing for the head of John the Baptist.

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The Gospels don't tell us her name, but Josephus does.

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He says that Herodias had one daughter and her name was Salome.

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And Salome went on to to marry Aristobulus.

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He was another Herodian.

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You know, the Herodians all intermarried, all the cousins were marrying each other.

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And, they both co-reigned for a very long time.

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Aristobulus lived into the 90s.

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And Salome lived until at least the late 60s.

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And Josephus knew,

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Aristobulus and Salome's son.

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So he knew that the son of the lady who danced for the head of John the Baptist.

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And there's some scholars, hypothesise that he actually knew Aristobulus

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and Salome themselves directly and clearly he was capable of this.

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He was well positioned to do that.

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And, both of those individuals, Salome and Aristobulus,

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would have been well placed to be a part of the trial of Jesus.

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Because what does Luke say?

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That Jesus was also brought to the house of Herod the Tetrarch on the Passover.

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He's the familial patriarch.

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That's where the Herodians would have gathered for Passover,

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which means Salome, the daughter-in-law, would have, the stepdaughter,

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and Aristobulus would have been there when Jesus was brought there.

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So so you can trace out all of these connections quite thoroughly.

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And, you know, one candidate that I only

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briefly mentioned, but one candidate is just Josephus’s father.

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You know, he was 25 years old when Jesus was crucified.

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He was an eminent priest.

00:15:00:11 - 00:15:02:12
He was in Jerusalem.

00:15:02:12 - 00:15:06:08
He he would have, you know, the crucifixion of Jesus was a public event.

00:15:06:08 - 00:15:08:10
You know, the Gospels say many people saw this.

00:15:08:10 - 00:15:11:06
So, you know, he's another plausible candidate.

00:15:11:06 - 00:15:13:22
I don't even list him as one of my primary ones.

00:15:13:22 - 00:15:20:16
But clearly, Josephus knew lots of people, many of whom would have met Jesus

00:15:20:16 - 00:15:24:05
directly or even have been at the trial, like I think his commander was.

00:15:25:01 - 00:15:26:12
Yeah, well that's phenomenal.

00:15:26:12 - 00:15:30:08
You're probably one of the very few people on the planet who who actually keeps,

00:15:31:08 - 00:15:32:04
the Herodian

00:15:32:04 - 00:15:35:04
dynasty’s genealogical line in your head.

00:15:35:07 - 00:15:39:17
You know, most of us mortals, look it up, and, remind ourselves.

00:15:39:23 - 00:15:44:02
But, the I mean, one of the things that strikes me just listening to you here, is

00:15:44:02 - 00:15:46:23
of course these are just the people we know about. I mean, these are the,

00:15:46:23 - 00:15:51:06
given that the limited number of sources that we have for Judaism

00:15:53:01 - 00:15:55:12
of Jesus’s day, you've got the New Testament, you've got Josephus.

00:15:55:12 - 00:15:57:02
We've got later traditions.

00:15:57:02 - 00:15:59:02
We don't actually have a lot written about them.

00:15:59:02 - 00:16:03:20
But even amongst what we do, we're finding overlaps of

00:16:04:13 - 00:16:07:13
personnel that, in normal circumstances,

00:16:07:13 - 00:16:10:13
provided no one's ill, need to be

00:16:10:18 - 00:16:13:13
at the particular places at the right time.

00:16:13:13 - 00:16:17:02
And then there must be all the ones we haven't heard of who just, names

00:16:17:02 - 00:16:19:06
haven't survived in history. And that's that's remarkable.

00:16:20:09 - 00:16:21:21
I seem to remember you say something

00:16:21:21 - 00:16:26:13
about the phrase that Josephus uses

00:16:27:13 - 00:16:30:22
makes you think that his source of information is these people.

00:16:30:22 - 00:16:33:06
So you’ve got,

00:16:33:06 - 00:16:35:12
where,

00:16:35:12 - 00:16:38:12
in this translation, ‘When Pilate, upon hearing him

00:16:38:12 - 00:16:42:12
accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified . . .’

00:16:42:21 - 00:16:45:21
Something about that that makes you think he's saying

00:16:46:16 - 00:16:48:07
And I talked to them about them.

00:16:48:07 - 00:16:49:04
Is that right?

00:16:49:04 - 00:16:52:04
Well, I think it's more that's more of,

00:16:52:10 - 00:16:54:23
I think it's primarily that that language

00:16:54:23 - 00:16:58:05
is a marker of Josephus saying, I knew these people.

00:16:58:18 - 00:17:01:18
I, I think it's an inference that he may

00:17:01:18 - 00:17:04:18
have learned about Jesus from them.

00:17:05:20 - 00:17:08:21
And I think that's reasonable because he was he was quite

00:17:08:21 - 00:17:10:23
well connected with some of these folks.

00:17:10:23 - 00:17:14:22
And we know that his commander Ananus the second, you know,

00:17:15:03 - 00:17:18:01
the guy whose brother-in-law was Caiaphas and whose father was

00:17:18:01 - 00:17:21:09
Annas, that, he had dealings with Christians.

00:17:21:09 - 00:17:25:05
Josephus tells us that his commander had James,

00:17:25:05 - 00:17:28:05
the brother of Jesus, executed, stoned to death.

00:17:28:13 - 00:17:30:13
And so clearly Christians—

00:17:30:13 - 00:17:33:13
He, his commander, did not like Christians.

00:17:33:13 - 00:17:37:19
And and Josephus also tells us that because he had James the brother

00:17:37:19 - 00:17:42:21
of Jesus stoned to death, that, his commander lost the high priesthood.

00:17:42:21 - 00:17:46:02
So he he detested Christians so thoroughly that he was willing

00:17:46:02 - 00:17:50:13
to risk his own high priesthood to have James the brother of Jesus executed.

00:17:50:13 - 00:17:54:03
So what this tells me is that, this man, Ananus

00:17:54:03 - 00:17:57:03
the second is intimately familiar with Christianity.

00:17:57:08 - 00:17:59:02
His family clearly was.

00:17:59:02 - 00:18:03:16
He's willing to risk quite a bit in order to stop the spread of

00:18:03:16 - 00:18:08:02
of this Jesus movement and, that he publicly lost his priesthood,

00:18:08:02 - 00:18:11:15
which means Josephus would have known all about this in 62 AD

00:18:11:23 - 00:18:13:04
when this happened. So

00:18:13:04 - 00:18:17:02
I think it's a very reasonable inference that he learned about Jesus from

00:18:18:02 - 00:18:19:02
the enemies of

00:18:19:02 - 00:18:22:15
of Jesus, so to speak, that he learned about Jesus from Jesus's enemies.

00:18:22:20 - 00:18:25:15
But I don't think that's, you mentioned before,

00:18:25:15 - 00:18:29:17
you know, there's any number of people, the peasants in Galilee, you know, random

00:18:29:17 - 00:18:33:13
citizens of Jerusalem he would have encountered, you know,

00:18:35:03 - 00:18:39:04
there's there's any number of people, some of whom may have been hostile

00:18:39:04 - 00:18:42:12
to Jesus, some of whom may have been sympathetic, others may have liked him.

00:18:42:12 - 00:18:44:14
I mean, it just, there could have been everything in between.

00:18:44:14 - 00:18:47:20
So, in other words, I think he had about as best information

00:18:47:20 - 00:18:51:23
as you could possibly hope for, to learn about Jesus.

00:18:52:23 - 00:18:55:22
And one of the things we did in the last episode was look at,

00:18:55:22 - 00:18:59:14
his particular phraseology and how it comes from Josephus,

00:19:00:00 - 00:19:04:21
as in the Josephus writing here, the 89 or 90 words in this passage,

00:19:05:20 - 00:19:07:04
have marks of his style.

00:19:07:04 - 00:19:12:03
So we talked about this phrase, par’ hēmin which is, for the Greek

00:19:12:03 - 00:19:17:04
geeks out there, par’, a preposition plus hēmeis, meaning us in the dative case,

00:19:18:00 - 00:19:21:05
which, is a particularly common phrase.

00:19:21:05 - 00:19:24:01
Would you say a phrase like that

00:19:24:01 - 00:19:27:05
is obviously it is used in other Greek writers,

00:19:27:05 - 00:19:31:04
but it's a particular thing that, alongside other evidences,

00:19:31:17 - 00:19:35:12
just suggests the whole tenor of this is his style.

00:19:36:18 - 00:19:37:20
Absolutely.

00:19:37:20 - 00:19:39:08
He he likes that phrase.

00:19:39:08 - 00:19:41:23
He uses it fifty-something times.

00:19:41:23 - 00:19:46:05
And you have to remember that Josephus delights in diversity.

00:19:46:05 - 00:19:46:19
He doesn't . . .

00:19:46:19 - 00:19:48:21
He likes having strange phrases.

00:19:48:21 - 00:19:50:16
He likes doing unique things.

00:19:50:16 - 00:19:53:13
I think at one point, I counted there's

00:19:53:13 - 00:19:56:13
a there's a Greek particle, you know, eti or something,

00:19:56:14 - 00:19:59:09
or nun, where he has that in,

00:19:59:09 - 00:20:03:04
like eighteen totally uniquely different phrases.

00:20:03:04 - 00:20:07:02
So he doesn't particularly enjoy using phrases repeatedly.

00:20:07:02 - 00:20:08:05
But this one he does.

00:20:08:05 - 00:20:11:05
And when you look at how he uses it,

00:20:11:09 - 00:20:14:01
he always uses it,

00:20:14:01 - 00:20:17:00
in, in ways to indicate direct familiarity.

00:20:17:00 - 00:20:20:19
So it not only matches his style, it also highlights the fact that he was

00:20:20:19 - 00:20:24:04
closely connected with the ‘first men’, the prōtoi who accused Jesus.

00:20:24:13 - 00:20:29:04
And when you then put together the phrase ‘the first men amongst

00:20:29:04 - 00:20:33:05
us’, it's, those are both Josephan phrases in their own right.

00:20:33:05 - 00:20:36:02
And then together a sort of super-Josephan phrase. Is that fair?

00:20:36:02 - 00:20:37:20
Yeah, precisely.

00:20:37:20 - 00:20:41:14
So, so so it becomes really hard

00:20:41:14 - 00:20:45:17
to imagine any scribe

00:20:46:16 - 00:20:48:03
so knowing the

00:20:48:03 - 00:20:51:10
style of Josephus, that they get this right, as in you would almost

00:20:51:14 - 00:20:54:20
need to have read Josephus lots and lots of times

00:20:55:04 - 00:20:59:09
to get his phraseology and, and basically back then

00:20:59:13 - 00:21:03:03
where there are people who forge stuff, they're never that good

00:21:03:08 - 00:21:07:01
at forging that sort of particularity of phrase.

00:21:07:01 - 00:21:12:03
So, so to do that across a passage, it just isn't plausible.

00:21:12:16 - 00:21:14:03
I completely agree.

00:21:14:03 - 00:21:17:19
I, in fact, there's some scholars that have claimed that

00:21:18:01 - 00:21:22:09
that phrase is a marker of inauthenticity because Josephus didn't use those phrases.

00:21:22:09 - 00:21:25:14
But of course, once we got Greek databases where we could just do

00:21:25:14 - 00:21:28:14
a quick search, we realised that actually he uses it all the time.

00:21:28:15 - 00:21:30:16
And so one of the arguments of authenticity

00:21:30:16 - 00:21:34:09
is that many of these parallel scholars, never, despite

00:21:34:16 - 00:21:38:05
editing Josephus, translating it, reading him many, many times.

00:21:38:05 - 00:21:40:08
They never noticed these parallels.

00:21:40:08 - 00:21:43:13
It took computer databases to reveal these things,

00:21:43:18 - 00:21:46:19
which suggests that Christian scribes would

00:21:46:19 - 00:21:50:13
have no ability to replicate this kind of, this kind of language.

00:21:50:13 - 00:21:53:09
It really can only come from Josephus.

00:21:53:09 - 00:21:57:08
And and this is what the field of forensic authorship analysis tells us.

00:21:57:08 - 00:22:00:08
It tells us that everybody has this unique idiolect

00:22:00:10 - 00:22:02:18
and that provided you have enough information,

00:22:02:18 - 00:22:05:22
you can kind of figure out what someone's style is.

00:22:06:06 - 00:22:11:01
And here we have the thumbprint of Josephus all over the passage about Jesus.

00:22:11:11 - 00:22:11:15
Yeah.

00:22:11:15 - 00:22:14:22
So idiolect, for those who haven't come across the term before, it's one of those

00:22:14:22 - 00:22:18:21
wonderful scholarly terms for your own way of talking and writing.

00:22:18:21 - 00:22:22:13
And that's, you know, like you got a dialect, that's for a group.

00:22:22:13 - 00:22:23:13
And you have one.

00:22:23:13 - 00:22:26:04
You have any idiolect. You may not know it, but you do.

00:22:26:04 - 00:22:26:22
So, yeah.

00:22:28:04 - 00:22:30:10
So bringing this together,

00:22:30:10 - 00:22:34:01
as we've been looking at these two episodes at your, your work.

00:22:34:01 - 00:22:39:00
Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ.

00:22:40:00 - 00:22:44:08
People can get that, from your website, Josephusandjesus.com.

00:22:45:01 - 00:22:47:22
They can get it from,

00:22:47:22 - 00:22:50:19
Oxford University Press.

00:22:50:19 - 00:22:54:02
Can you sort of put together what significance

00:22:54:02 - 00:22:58:09
you think this has for people who are looking into Christianity,

00:22:58:23 - 00:23:02:08
today or people who are Christians, what what it means for a wider culture,

00:23:02:09 - 00:23:05:08
because obviously it's it's a place where there's

00:23:05:08 - 00:23:08:20
a lot of scholarly detail in there, but there's also a wider conversation,

00:23:09:08 - 00:23:09:21
that's going on.

00:23:09:21 - 00:23:12:01
And maybe you can address, that.

00:23:12:01 - 00:23:15:13
What what would you, you would say to, people today

00:23:15:13 - 00:23:20:09
P: who are looking into, these sort of  things T: You know, first and foremost,

00:23:21:21 - 00:23:23:20
this is just another witness

00:23:23:20 - 00:23:28:08
to the most amazing human who ever walked the earth, which is special in of itself.

00:23:28:08 - 00:23:31:04
But the particular things that it adds

00:23:31:04 - 00:23:34:15
is that when you look at historical Jesus theories,

00:23:35:03 - 00:23:36:01
secular scholars,

00:23:36:01 - 00:23:39:21
they try very hard to figure out, you know, how did the reports of Jesus's

00:23:39:21 - 00:23:43:02
miracles, how did the reports of his resurrection develop?

00:23:43:20 - 00:23:45:20
And they they theorise that, you know,

00:23:45:20 - 00:23:48:20
the disciples were were lying or that the disciples,

00:23:49:15 - 00:23:53:12
slowly over the generations, these these claims were exaggerated,

00:23:54:06 - 00:23:58:13
so that, Jesus went from being originally just a humble country preacher

00:23:58:13 - 00:24:03:07
to this wonder worker, this miracle worker in later Christian generations.

00:24:03:16 - 00:24:08:17
But what this book does is, I think it shows that those theories don't stand,

00:24:08:18 - 00:24:13:20
that Josephus says that Jesus worked miracles.

00:24:14:07 - 00:24:16:07
He's suspicious about their origin.

00:24:16:07 - 00:24:19:16
You know, he's worried about whether they're coming from from from,

00:24:19:20 - 00:24:22:21
you know, negative supernatural power, demonic power or something like that.

00:24:23:07 - 00:24:25:16
But, he, he does think he did,

00:24:25:16 - 00:24:29:14
he worked miracles, and he affirms that the disciples

00:24:29:14 - 00:24:34:19
did believe on the third day that Jesus had risen from the dead.

00:24:35:04 - 00:24:39:13
And, that that tells us that Josephus didn't view

00:24:39:19 - 00:24:44:17
the narrative of Jesus's resurrection as some kind of later artefact

00:24:44:17 - 00:24:47:21
that developed after a long game of telephone or something like that.

00:24:48:13 - 00:24:51:20
Josephus has, every ability to criticise

00:24:51:20 - 00:24:54:20
the supernatural, you know, he laughs at magical stories.

00:24:55:05 - 00:24:57:16
He he he exposes impostors.

00:24:57:16 - 00:24:58:18
He has no problem

00:24:58:18 - 00:25:02:20
talking about and criticising people who are faking things or lying.

00:25:03:04 - 00:25:06:15
But with Jesus, he says, you know, the disciples

00:25:06:15 - 00:25:09:21
believed this, that this happened on the third day.

00:25:09:21 - 00:25:13:00
And so I think it it forces the conversation

00:25:13:00 - 00:25:18:01
to what happened on the third day after Jesus died.

00:25:18:16 - 00:25:22:13
The disciples came away saying he was raised to life again,

00:25:22:19 - 00:25:25:18
and they were willing to lay their lives down for that belief.

00:25:27:00 - 00:25:29:12
And Josephus witnesses to that, too.

00:25:29:12 - 00:25:32:23
He mentions the brother of Jesus being stoned

00:25:32:23 - 00:25:35:23
to death, ostensibly for being a Christian.

00:25:36:01 - 00:25:37:14
So Josephus also witnesses

00:25:37:14 - 00:25:40:14
to their their persistence despite persecution in this belief.

00:25:41:19 - 00:25:44:08
Well, that's a wonderful place to end, Tom.

00:25:44:08 - 00:25:47:01
We’re so glad for you spending time with us, and thank you for writing

00:25:47:01 - 00:25:50:04
this Oxford University Press book, Josephus and Jesus:

00:25:50:16 - 00:25:53:19
New evidence for the One Called Christ, which you can get online.

00:25:53:19 - 00:25:56:14
And, thank you for joining us on the Tyndale House podcast.

00:25:56:14 - 00:25:58:20
Thank you to everyone for listening.

00:25:58:20 - 00:26:00:16
Please do rate and review.

00:26:00:16 - 00:26:03:04
And, thank you very much, Tom, for joining us.

00:26:03:04 - 00:26:04:20
And, God bless you all.