Page "Josephus on Jesus" Paragraph 24

One of the reasons the works of Josephus were copied and maintained by Christians was that his writings provided a good deal of information about a number of figures mentioned in the New Testamant, and the background to events such as the death of James during a gap in Roman governing authority.

Because manuscript transmission was done by hand-copying, typically by monastic scribes, almost all ancient texts have been subject to both accidental and deliberate alterations, emendations ( called interpolation ) or elisions.

It is both the lack of any original corroborating manuscript source outside the Christian tradition as well as the practice of Christian interpolation that has led to the scholarly debate regarding the authenticity of Josephus ' references to Jesus in his work.

Although there is no doubt that most ( but not all ) of the later copies of the Antiquities contained references to Jesus and John the Baptist, it cannot be definitively shown that these were original to Josephus writings, and were not instead added later by Christian interpolators.

Much of the scholarly work concerning the references to Jesus in Josephus has thus concentrated on close textual analysis of the Josephan corpus to determine the degree to which the language, as preserved in both early Christian quotations and the later transmissions, should be considered authentic.