261029 – Josephus on the Resurrection

by | Oct 29, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

What Did Josephus Write About the Resurrection?

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

The news and where I stand

This fall, a headline announced that a written account of Jesus rising from the dead had been “identified” in a 2,000-year-old manuscript. The headline overstates what happened. No new manuscript was found. What happened is that an independent Spanish researcher, Jesús Fernández-Pedrera Correa, took a fresh look at a passage we have known about for centuries and compared its surviving versions in four languages.

The passage is the Testimonium Flavianum, “the testimony of Flavius,” a short paragraph about Jesus in the Jewish Antiquities of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, written around AD 93 to 94. His conclusion is modest, and I think it is right.

I stand on the side of this conclusion: Josephus, a Jew who never became a Christian, wrote about Jesus, and he recorded that Jesus’ followers reported seeing him alive on the third day after his crucifixion. Josephus did not confess the resurrection. He reported that it was being proclaimed by the people who said they had witnessed it. That is less than the popular headline claims. It is also more than many skeptics have been willing to allow.

Below I explain what the passage says, why scholars have doubted parts of it, what the comparison of versions shows, where the uncertainty honestly lies, and why the central point holds.

Who Josephus was and what the passage says

Josephus was born in Jerusalem around AD 37 into a priestly family. He commanded Jewish forces in Galilee during the revolt against Rome, surrendered, and later lived in Rome under the patronage of the Flavian emperors, whose family name he took. He wrote as a Jew, for a Roman audience, about the history of his people. He had no reason to flatter Christians, and every reason to be careful about a movement Rome regarded with suspicion.

In book 18 of the Antiquities, while describing troubles under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, he includes a paragraph about Jesus. In William Whiston’s classic 1737 translation of the Greek, it reads:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

The passage is found in every surviving Greek manuscript of the Antiquities. Yet scholars have long suspected that parts of it read like a Christian, not a Jew. Three phrases draw the most fire: “if it be lawful to call him a man,” “He was the Christ,” and the sentence about appearing alive on the third day as the prophets foretold. A Jewish historian who did not believe in Jesus would hardly write those words in that form.

The question, then, has never been whether Josephus mentioned Jesus. Most scholars, believing and unbelieving, accept that he did. The question is which words are his and which were added by Christian scribes who copied his work over the following centuries.

Four versions, four witnesses

The passage reached us in Greek and also in three later retellings by Christian writers working in other languages. Where these independent lines agree, we are likely closer to what Josephus wrote. Where they differ, we can see where copyists may have changed things.

Version Who preserved it, and when On whether Jesus was the Messiah On the third day
Greek Every surviving manuscript of the Antiquities; quoted by Eusebius in the early 300s States flatly that he was the Christ He appeared to them alive on the third day, as the prophets foretold
Latin Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men, about AD 392 He was believed to be the Christ He appeared to them alive on the third day
Arabic Agapius, Christian bishop of Hierapolis, 10th century He was perhaps the Messiah His disciples reported that he appeared to them alive three days after the crucifixion
Syriac Michael the Syrian, patriarch of Antioch, 12th century He was thought to be the Messiah Describes him appearing alive to his followers

Two patterns stand out. First, on the Messiah, the three non-Greek versions all soften the claim from a statement of fact to a statement of what people believed. Second, on the resurrection, all four versions keep the appearance on the third day. None drops it. What changes is the frame: the Arabic presents it as something the disciples said, while the Greek presents it as fact sealed by prophecy.

The early church writer Origen, around AD 248, adds a third clue. He wrote that Josephus did not accept Jesus as the Christ. Origen had the Antiquities in front of him. Had his copy said “He was the Christ,” he could hardly have said that.

What Josephus most likely wrote

Fernández-Pedrera Correa’s argument follows from these patterns, and it fits how Josephus wrote elsewhere.

The resurrection report. Josephus routinely described what Jewish groups believed and claimed without endorsing it himself. He tells us what the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes held about the soul and the afterlife, in a reporter’s voice. The researcher argues that Josephus did the same here. The original sentence probably said that Jesus’ followers reported he had appeared to them alive on the third day. The Arabic wording preserves that reporting frame. Later Christian copyists, for whom the event was simply true, sharpened “they reported” into a plain statement and added the line about the prophets, which reads like Christian preaching rather than history.

The Messiah. Here the case for alteration is strongest. Three later versions say Jesus was believed or thought to be the Messiah, and Origen says Josephus did not accept him as such. The original most likely said something close to “he was believed to be the Christ.” That is consistent with the other place Josephus mentions Jesus, in book 20, where he calls James “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.” Nearly all scholars accept that later reference as genuine.

“If it be lawful to call him a man.” This phrase is missing from the Arabic but present in the Latin and Syriac. Its absence may mean it was added, or it may mean the Arabic writer simply shortened the passage. The evidence here is weaker either way.

The closing line. The statement that the Christians, named after him, had not died out in Josephus’ own day is the part the researcher is most confident about. Its wording fits Josephus’ habits, and the versions show no meaningful disagreement at that point.

Put together, the reconstructed core reads roughly like this: there was a wise man named Jesus who did remarkable deeds and taught many; he was believed to be the Messiah; Pilate condemned him to the cross at the urging of Jewish leaders; his followers did not abandon him, and they reported that he appeared to them alive on the third day; and his followers, the Christians, still exist today.

Where the uncertainty lies

I hold the position above firmly, and I want to be exact about what it does not rest on.

  • No original survives. We have no copy from Josephus’ own hand or from his century. The oldest complete Greek manuscripts are medieval. Every reconstruction, including this one, is an inference from later copies.
  • The later versions are not independent of Christian hands. All three non-Greek witnesses come from Christian writers living three to eleven centuries after Josephus. Their softer wording might preserve the original, or it might reflect their own paraphrasing. The researcher himself says his reconstruction is plausible but unproven.
  • Scholars read the same evidence in opposite directions. In 2018 the Italian scholar Giuseppe Petrantoni compared the same Syriac and Arabic verbs and concluded that the resurrection sentence shows a Christian insertion modeled on the Gospel of Mark. In 2025 T. C. Schmidt argued in a book from Oxford University Press that the whole passage is genuine Josephus, and that the Greek verb usually translated “appeared” can carry the sense of “seemed,” so the passage never affirmed the resurrection in the first place.
  • Language is slippery. “Appeared” in Greek, “reported” in Arabic, and “was believed” in Latin can each be read more strongly or more weakly. The exact force of Josephus’ original sentence cannot be recovered with certainty.

Notice, though, what these disagreements are about. They concern how Josephus framed the claim, not whether a claim of resurrection appearances existed in his day. Even the skeptical reading agrees that by the time the passage was copied, the third-day appearance was at its center.

Why the witness still carries weight

The uncertainty about wording does not dissolve the central point. Several lines of reasoning keep it standing.

A reported resurrection is exactly what we should expect from Josephus. If he wrote about Jesus at all, and nearly everyone agrees he did, then he was describing a movement whose whole reason for existing was the claim that its founder had been seen alive after his execution. A historian explaining why “the tribe of Christians” had not died out would have to say what kept them together. The disciples’ report of the appearances is the answer. A version of the passage with the resurrection removed entirely would be the strange one.

Every line of transmission kept it. Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac copyists, working in different centuries and churches, softened or dropped other phrases. None of them dropped the third-day appearance. Its persistence across all four is evidence that it was part of the core text they each received.

The reporting frame is the more credible frame, not the weaker one. A believer may feel let down that Josephus only reported what the disciples said. He should not be. A neutral historian recording that the followers of an executed man insisted they had seen him alive is more useful to an honest inquirer than a Christian-sounding confession would be. It places the claim where the New Testament places it: in the testimony of eyewitnesses, made public within living memory, and known even to an outsider writing in Rome some sixty years later.

It agrees with the other non-Christian evidence. Josephus’ undisputed reference to “Jesus who was called Christ” and the Roman historian Tacitus’ report, around AD 116, that Christ was executed under Pilate and that the movement then broke out again, both point the same way. The followers did not scatter after the cross. Something convinced them otherwise, and they said what it was.

I am not arguing that Josephus proves the resurrection. No historian can do that, and faith was never meant to rest on one paragraph of one historian. I am arguing that a careful, non-Christian Jew, writing in the first century, recorded that the disciples proclaimed Jesus alive on the third day. The disciples’ proclamation itself is already well attested: Paul’s letters record it within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion. What Josephus adds is an outsider’s confirmation of that proclamation, from a writer with no stake in it. Together they weigh heavily against the old claim that the resurrection was a legend that grew up generations later.

A closing reflection

There is a lesson here about how we hold the truth. For centuries some Christians defended every word of the Greek Testimonium as Josephus’ own, and some skeptics dismissed the whole paragraph as a forgery. Both positions were easier than the truth, which takes patience to find. Careful comparison of the witnesses, done honestly and without forcing a conclusion, gives us something better than either: a Jewish historian’s plain record that the followers of Jesus said they had seen him alive.

That is the same pattern the Gospels describe. The first word of the resurrection was not an argument but a report: we have seen him. Josephus, perhaps without intending to, passed that report on to the Roman world. We are free to weigh it, as he invited his readers to weigh the claims of every group he described. I have weighed it, and I find it credible.

Sources

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