"There Lived Jesus ..."
Josephus had written an even lengthier section about Jesus, which is called the Testimonium Flavianum and it is among the most hotly disputed in ancient literature bcause on it's surface it appears to provide sweeping corroboration of Jesus' life, miracles, death and resurrection ...
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one could call him a man, for he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly, he won over many Jews and many of the Greeks, he was the Christ, when Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him, on the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared ...
scholarship has gone through 3 trends about this passage, the early Christians thought it was a wonderful and thoroughly authentic attestation of Jesus and his resurrection, then the entire passage was questioned by at least some scholars during the Enlightenment, but today, there's remarkable consensus among both Jewish and Christian scholars that the passage as a whole is authentic, although there may be some interpolations, that means that early Christian copyists inserted some phrases that a Jewish writer like Josephus would not have written, for instance, the first line says, "about this time there lived Jesus, a wise man ..." that phrase is not normally used of Jesus by Christians, so it seems authentic for Josephus, but the next phrase says, "if indeed one ought to call him a man", this implies Jesus was more than human, which appears to be an interpolation, the bottom line is that the passage in Josephus probably was written about Jesus, Josephus corroborates important information about Jesus: that he was the martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and that he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilate at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders
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