This is a comment I just put on the blog. Did Louis Feldman reverse his position about Josephus?
Two articles about Josephus written by linguists Paul Hopper (Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University) and Ken Olson (Senior Linguist Consultant at The University of Chicago):
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Here’s another article by G.J. Goldberg, but I can’t find anything about who he is or his background—
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And last but not least, this book or article (I can’t tell which) by Louis Feldman—
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Even the reconstruction attempts of this passage that leave out the obvious interpolations (“He was the Christ”, etc) still seem a bit overdone to me for Josephus. My hypothesis is that there might originally have been a minimalist reference to Jesus. Someone who perhaps knew Josephus’ works and his biography sweetened the reference a bit to make it favorable without making it sound like Josephus was a believer. Then later some clueless goober came along and made it sound like it was composed by a believer.
In other words, not a single interpolation but multiple layers, so much so that if an original authentic reference existed it is occluded to us.
Personally I’ve always found the reference in 20:9 about the death of James to be more interesting because it is so offhand and provides us a historical datum. I suspect the TF was also similarly offhand.
(just some light relief)BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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