This continues my series that responds to Raphael Lataster’s article, Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories. After critiquing the biblical evidence for Jesus, he goes on to look at the extra-biblical evidence.
I have no desire to defend the Roman evidence. I think it is helpful and interesting, but it mostly just testifies that there were people at that time who believed in Jesus or who were called Christians. I am much more interested in Josephus.
It is not surprising that Lataster rejects Josephus. The Testamonium Flavianum is a passage in Antiquities of the Jews, in which Josephus mentions Jesus. Scholars have long recognized that there is some evidence of Christian tampering in this passage.
Lataster observes:
Many scholars see this passage as fraudulent, in whole or in part.
His reference for the idea that scholars regard it as fraudulent in whole is a book review written by Steve Mason of a book written by a different author. Quoting a book review for the support of widespread scholarly rejection is rather strange. This is especially strange as Steve Mason actually believes that there is an original core passage about Jesus written by Josephus that was later added to.
Lataster also quotes Bart Ehrman as an authority for the doubting the authenticity of the passage, even though Ehrman does hold that Josephus said something about Jesus. By just reading Lataster’s article, one might mistakenly think that Mason and Ehrman agree with him.
In fact that is the position held by most Josephus scholars and other historians of first century Judaism and Christianity. It is not a question of either the passage as it stands is original or it is all fraudulent. It is most common to accept that Josephus said something and a later Christian tried to “improve” on Josephus.
There is also something Lataster says that I’m not sure what to do with. He says:
There is also some measure of doubt as to Josephus’ reliability as a historian, given his sympathy towards supernatural concepts.
In one way, I’m impressed because it demonstrates some consistency on Lataster’s part. It is common for Jesus Mythicists to reject the New Testament evidence because of the inclusion of miracles but then they remain silent of other ancient historical sources that mention miracles. If the Gospels are bad history because they include the supernatural, then so is Josephus.
But on the other hand, all of the ancient histories and biographies were written within a worldview that was open to the supernatural. People didn’t really question miracles until the Enlightenment. If we rejected all writings that were “sympathy towards supernatural concepts” we would have to reject almost all of ancient history.
Did Josephus write something about Jesus? Almost certainly. Lataster falls into the familiar Mythicist trend of rejecting in whole a passage that has only partially been tampered with.
