The Historical Jesus: New Evidence or New Techniques?

Abstract

Thomas C. Schmidt’s Josephus on Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (2025) is a new study of a famous passage concerning Jesus in Josephus’s Antiquities (18.63–64): the testimonium flavianum (TF). Schmidt’s energetically argued case that Josephus personally knew people present at Jesus’s trial, who became his informants for the TF, is creating an impact far beyond the academy. If valid, that claim would transform the TF from something Josephus may have partly written in the 90s (scholars usually debate which phrases are authentic) into the earliest eyewitness evidence for Jesus and his followers. This article first contextualises the TF in Josephus’s life and Judaean Antiquities, then summarises Schmidt’s case before probing its assumptions, gaps, and interpretations – of Josephus, the New Testament, and rabbinic literature. It finds that the elaborate case for the TF’s oft-doubted authenticity (in Part 1) must be taken seriously, whereas the more sensational claims (in Part 2) do not well explain the evidence.