quote:
I think it's funny that you treat taking a historian's word who wrote books 60 years after Jesus' death is ridiculous while wondering why I'm being so stubborn by not accepting the opinion of a message board poster 1,980-ish years after Jesus' death.

quote:
I'd like to hear YOUR assessment of Josephus' references to Jesus.

MY position is that of a classical agnostic. I don't think we can say for certain what was authentic, omitted or supplanted and the criterion for doing so by modern scholarship is benign.

JOSEPHUS DOT frickING ORG

Found in all surviving manuscripts Christian content unlikely from a Jewish writer (esp., "He was the Messiah.").

Quoted in full by Eusebius, c. 324 CE Writers earlier than Eusebius do not cite the passage; Origen states that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Messiah.

A more accepted reference to Jesus in Book 20 indicates that he must have been described earlier in the Antiquities, logically at the discussion of Pilate.

The passage breaks the continuity of the narrative concerning Pilate.

Vocabulary and style are generally consistent with that of Josephus

There are stylistic peculiarities that are not found in Josephus, such as the use of the first person in "the principal men among us".

No other passage in the Antiquities has been seriously questioned, so the burden of proof is on the skeptics.

Interpolations have been found in isolated manuscripts of Josephus, such as accounts of Jesus in the Slavonic version.

There are tons of arguments for authenticity just as there are tons against it -- I'm more skeptical about this than I am anything else.