There is a new book published by Oxford University Press that is a travesty of Christian apologetics undeservedly snaking the respectability of, well, Oxford University: T.C. Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. The rhetorical objective of this book is to convince people that the Testimonium Flavianum, a fawning paragraph about Jesus in the manuscripts of Josephus, not only is entirely authentic exactly as written, but that this proves Josephus had a stellar array of sources that fully entail Jesus existed as a historical person. But it only gets there with dubious apologetical techniques, playing fast and loose with evidence, sources, and logic, in a manner that no professional Oxford peer reviewer should ever have allowed to print. Yet lots of people are being suckered by this. So an exposé is needed.

Overall Assessment

Schmidt operates ironically a lot like Ammon Hillman, whom I just dismantled. Like Hillman, Schmidt’s method consists essentially of mistranslating Greek and abusing sources in a way that is, at worst, grossly fraudulent, and, at best, fatally incompetent. The principal difference is that Hillman is a paedofantasist and Schmidt is a doe-eyed Christian straight out of a Jack Chick tract (with a PhD from Yale and a professorship at the Jesuit-run Fairfield University). Hillman is obsessed with fabricating a false narrative about drug abuse and pedophilia. But Schmidt is only obsessed with making evidence inconvenient to his faith go away, by rewriting history to get ‘the mean Jew’ to say mocking things about Christianity, in order to sell that as proving those mocked things were well-sourced and thus true. Both stories are just as fabricated, and involve similar abuses—of the Greek language (Schmidt is on this point only less insane than Hillman in how far he will go, but the direction is the same); and of his sources (at crucial points misrepresenting what they say with convenient omissions and false descriptions). And they both rely on many of the same fallacies of logic popular among apologists for any false beliefs, which methods have no place in respectable academia. We find all the same stuff here that turns the public off from trusting any experts in this field.

Schmidt does specifically criticize one (and only one) argument of mine, but only in an appendix. So I will get to that in a separate article (T.C. Schmidt on James in Josephus: Apologetics vs. History). Here I just want to survey enough examples of Schmidt’s trickery so you know (a) what the rest of his book is like, (b) that Schmidt is doing this to all the scholars in this field whose arguments he wants to go away (not just me), and (c) how you can fact-check Schmidt on your own, by following the examples here. In short: the following will establish Schmidt’s playbook. And once you know how he runs plays, you’ll know what to look for in every other instance. This is not, in my opinion, legitimate scholarship. It is a disingenuous exercise in disinformation and historical revisionism. And it is indeed exactly the kind of thing that gives this field a bad name. Oxford has truly burned its rep on this.

The Olson Analysis

I want to begin by walking you through something I caught right away. Because when I first picked up this book, I started with the question of how Schmidt could possibly have overcome Ken Olson’s devastating stylometric proof that the TF is far more Eusebian than Josephan in its vocabulary and idioms. And the very first example-case I read and fact-checked fell apart so hard I was gobsmacked at how fraudulent Schmidt’s entire argument appeared to be. I then found this was a pattern, with example after example. Schmidt’s entire book is like this. You’ll get the feeling by the end of this critique. Then you’ll see what I’m saying. But let’s go through this example. Then we’ll get to a plethora of others.

I recently wrote up an analysis of stylometrics as a methodology (Part 1 and Part 2), and I should remind readers here that the TF is too short for mathematical stylometrics. We have to use manual stylo. Which often can be inconclusive unless a forger deviated a lot from the target author’s style—like they did in the long ending of Mark: see the stylometric analysis of that in my chapter in Hitler Homer Bible Christ. The same thing was most thoroughly done for the TF by Ken Olson.

Olson has written two papers together destroying any claim that the TF is in Josephan style, thoroughly establishing that it is much closer to Eusebian style. I’ll show you a few examples of that, but Olson catalogs dozens more in “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations (ed. Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott: Harvard University Press, 2013), 97-114, and “Eusebius and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61.2 (1999), 305-22. He also contributed an important analysis on the Jesus Blog, “The Testimonium Flavianum, Eusebius, and Consensus,” 2013, which Schmidt ignores, yet it prebunks some of Schmidt’s rhetoric, so it can’t really be overlooked here. But I’ll stick with the first example I checked that Schmidt got from the other two.

Schmidt’s entire strategy seems to be to fake up the data, by leaving out what Olson’s actual data was and replacing it with different data, and then claim Olson’s conclusion is refuted when one applies the same analysis to that bogus data. When you put the real data back in, Schmidt’s entire argument is reversed and thus destroyed. That he operates this way time and again suggests a strategy and not mere catastrophic incompetence. But you’ll have to judge that for yourself. From where I sit it looks like Schmidt is snowing his readers and peers by not telling them what Olson’s actual data is, and instead telling everyone it was something else, and then ginning up a narrative by which that fake data leads to Schmidt’s conclusion rather than Olson’s.

Let’s see this in action.

Schmidt claims “Olson is incorrect when he says that Josephus never uses the phrase … ‘ten thousand other things’ (ἄλλα μυρία)” (p. 101), calling that “normal hyperbole for Josephus” (which is disingenuous to claim, since Olson didn’t argue it wasn’t) and saying “Josephus uses it twice elsewhere” even though Olson (supposedly) said he never used it at all. This looks a lot like lying to me, because that is not at all what Olson said. Ken Olson’s actual argument (which Schmidt never describes) regarding the variance in style between Eusebius and Josephus is in the use of tauta te kai alla muria, “and also ten thousand other things,” and more specifically, kai alla muria, a phrase peculiar to Eusebius and never used by Josephus. Olson did not say this was the case for just “ten thousand other (things)” (just alla muria, a common phrase in Greek literature). So here Olson’s actual data (the complete and peculiar idiom kai alla muria) has been erased (we’re never shown or told that) and replaced with fake data (the routine Greek phrase alla muria), then it’s claimed Olson made a false statement about this data (implying Olson’s dishonesty or incompetence), when of course, being fake data, his claim wasn’t about that data, but the actual data Olson presented.

In other words: Olson actually said “and ten thousand other things” (kai alla muria) is not Josephan but Eusebian—not that Josephus never uses any of those words. So that Josephus never used alla muria is the faked-up claim. Olson never said that. He said Josephus never uses kai alla muria, whereas Eusebius loved that phrase and used it many times. It is this that evinces the TF is a forgery, and indeed forged by Eusebius. I think the forger could perhaps be Pamphilus, if every idiom linked to Eusebius was learned from his tutor, who did indeed have control of the very same manuscripts Eusebius was looking at and thus could have doctored them before Eusebius was the wiser. But Eusebius is still suspect number one. Regardless, by changing Olson’s data, Schmidt has thus erased Olson’s actual argument, hidden it from his readers, and invented a straw man in its place—and then declared Olson the one who is making a false statement. It is in fact Schmidt who is. And as you’ll see, this happens more than once in Schmidt. Which gives me the ick. This looks manipulative and sleazy.

But let me show you.

If you search the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for Schmidt’s (not Olson’s) conjunction of alla muria in Josephus you will find six hits, four of which aren’t this phrase. Which is why Schmidt says Josephus uses it only “twice.” Which cannot really be described as “normal” for Josephus. Just twice means it is actually quite unusual for Josephus. But at least he does use it. Most authors did. It was a standard idiom in ancient Greek, appearing thousands of times in Greek literature. Philo of Alexandria, for example, used it dozens of times; likewise Eusebius—far more than Josephus. But of the only two times Josephus did:

• One is in Antiquities 13.382, where Josephus says someone did “ten thousand other things” to agitate someone else. But there Josephus writes alla te muria, not tauta te kai alla muria, or even kai alla muria. Josephus uses the particle te alone, not kai. So as Olson said (which Schmidt has hidden from you) this is not an example of the TF matching Josephan style. It is in an example of the TF violating Josephan style.
• Schmidt’s other example is in War 2.361. But there the phrase is alla te ethnê muria, “and another ten thousand nations,” where again there is no kai (Josephus again prefers the particle te by itself), and here the sense is not of an abstract “things” but a concrete “nations,” and the referent (nations) is placed within the phrase—whereas the TF places its referent (tauta, “things”) outside the phrase. So as Olson indicated (which Schmidt has hidden from you) this is not an example of the TF matching Josephan style. It is in fact an example of it violating Josephan style.

So the TF here reflects a deviation from the style evinced elsewhere in Josephus. Josephus does not sound like or write like the TF. With only one real parallel to go by (and another somewhat distant) it’s not possible to say whether Josephus wouldn’t have varied his style had he used the same idiom again, but what we cannot say is that the TF matches any known idiom of Josephus. It quite distinctly does not. Schmidt is not telling us the truth.

This was the first half of Olson’s point about this one phrase (wait til we get to the other half). He has many other examples for a powerful cumulative case. This isn’t the only one. And Schmidt runs the same game on them all. Here Schmidt claims instead what is only trivially true, that Josephus knows the vague idiom “countless other things” (alla muria). But that was not Olson’s data. His data has been erased and replaced. Schmidt then claims Olson had no data evincing the TF deviating from Josephan style. Which is a lie. Or so it looks to me. Sure, maybe it’s the most outrageously amateurish mistake imaginable for a Yale grad, and Schmidt is just phenomenally incompetent. But that’s not a good look for Schmidt and his reviewers either. And if his reviewers were trusting him to correctly present Olson’s data and respond to that (and not something else), then Schmidt conned his reviewers, and they should be outraged. Unless they like this kind of con and don’t mind publishing such disinformation “for the cause.” Which indicts the entire field of biblical studies. So you’ll have to decide which sequence of events is more likely, based on what else you know about this field and its elite capture by Christian propagandists.

In any other knowledge field, a researcher caught faking their data would be censured and their work retracted for data fraud. But here we are supposed to bow to the Fallacy of Prestige and insist this must just be an innocent mistake, that somehow Schmidt didn’t understand Olson’s argument and didn’t look at his evidence closely, and thus didn’t present his actual evidence but some other evidence Olson didn’t present, completely botching a research result, and misleading all his peers and readers, even about the moot data Schmidt did present (remember, we haven’t even gotten to Olson’s principal data here).

But I struggle to believe this is just a botch. Once or twice, maybe that could have happened. But Schmidt’s book is littered with examples like this (as you’ll see). That looks like a pattern. And a pattern looks like a strategy. But whichever it is, why did Oxford’s peer reviewers pass this? Were they foolishly trusting Schmidt to have correctly presented Olson’s data? Will they admit they should not have? Will this inspire them to re-check all of Schmidt’s examples to see if there are any more botched results like this? And when they find a ton of them (as they will), will they demand Oxford retract this publication? You and I know they never will. And that is why publications in this field cannot be trusted.

And I remind you again: that’s only half of Olson’s point.

Wait for it…

Olson’s argument was not merely that the data indicate Josephus did not write the TF (because it exhibits too many words and idioms unknown to Josephus), but that it indicates Eusebius did.

Let’s contrast Schmidt’s “two examples” from Josephus (which evince exactly the opposite of what Schmidt claims) with Olson’s eight examples in Eusebius:

• Demonstration of the Gospel 1.Proem.3: kai alla muria
• Demonstration of the Gospel 1.7.4: kai alla muria
• Demonstration of the Gospel 5.16.3: kai alla muria
• Ecclesiastical Theology 1.20.18: kai alla muria
• Commentary on Isaiah 1.62.81: kai alla muria
• Commentary on Isaiah 1.98.56: kai alla muria
• Commentary on Isaiah 1.98.58: kai alla muria
• Commentary on Psalms 1080.21: kai alla muria

This exact phrase is normal for Eusebius: he used exactly the same three words together for exactly the same meaning over eight times. Josephus did this zero times. And only once did Josephus form at least the same syntax, yet with te rather than kai. Eusebius routinely uses kai. And only one other time did Josephus use alla muria but not in the Eusebian sense of “things” but of “nations”— a concrete thing, not an abstract “thing.” And Josephus put the object of the adjective inside the adjectival phrase; while the author of the TF placed it outside, thus preserving a Eusebian (not Josephan) fondness for an uninterrupted kai alla muria. So. Who has an obsession with keeping that phrase uninterrupted? Eusebius. Not Josephus.

Now that you have seen this, Olson’s actual data, you may be outraged. If you aren’t, you should seriously ask yourself why you aren’t. You were just conned—either deliberately or by the happenstance of a most marvelous incompetence. Are you just “okay” with that?

It gets worse, of course.

Eusebius loves this triadic clause so much that he uses it even with concrete nouns: in Demonstration of the Gospel 4.15.7 he writes καὶ ἄλλαις μυρίαις ἀνθρωποθυσίαις, preserving the exact phrase kai alla muria even when he attaches it (as in the TF) to a noun or pronoun—and indeed, as expected, placing that outside the phrase, as tauta is in the TF. So, unlike Josephus, Eusebius prefers to write exactly what we find in the TF, while Josephus prefers not to. And Eusebius exhibits this with example after example—remember, I am deep-diving just one example. But for now let’s stick to that.

Eusebius breaks his beloved phrase up rarely—and then only with a particle, as required when starting a new sentence. And usually not with the Josephan preference, te, but the Eusebian preference, de (Preparation for the Gospel 1.3.12, kai alla de muria; Ecclesiastical Theology 2.20.6, kai alla de muria; only once with kai out of order: Against Hierocles 394.15, muria de kai alla)—and that is only because he is starting a new sentence in those cases, where de has the function of punctuating a sentence break. Even when Eusebius deviates (in Preparation for the Gospel 3.6.2 and 8.14.2, Demonstration 3.2.78 and 4.10.8, and In Praise of Constantine 12.12), he simply inverts the words to say the same thing, kai muria alla—and that is assuming those are not scribal inversions (whereby Eusebius actually wrote kai alla muria each time). All other examples one might find in Eusebius are either quotations of other authors, or not the same idiom of “countless other things.” And even those show his preference for placing a referent noun or pronoun outside the phrase, and not—like Josephus—inside it, which is still closer to the style of the TF than what we find in Josephus.

Only twice do we find just muria te alla (Demonstration 4.17.3; Prophetic Eclogues 168.1) and only once tauta…muria te alla (Preparation for the Gospel 14.25.17). Which contrasts with dozens of cases approximating kai alla muria, and eight using exactly kai alla muria. So when it comes to just saying simply “countless other things,” Eusebius’s most consistent trend is to say kai alla muria. Exactly what we find in the TF—but never in Josephus. All as Olson actually argued. Whether by incompetence or dishonesty, Schmidt simply erased the actual evidence against his point—hiding it from his readers, reviewers, and peers—and replaced it with bogus evidence for it. So, is this legitimate scholarship, or dubious Christian apologetics?

It looks to me like Schmidt presents faked-up data, hides the real data, and thereby generates a false result. Apologetics, not scholarship. So, was this a one-off? Or does it typify his entire book? I’ll show you numerous examples that it is typical.

The Hopper and Goldberg Analysis

Schmidt fails to engage with all the leading scholarship against him, thus failing to heed my warning in Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014. Most crucially, Schmidt never even mentions, much less discusses Paul Hopper’s devastating demonstration that the Testimonium Flavianum (or TF) thoroughly violates Josephan discourse style and cannot be by him in any form (whether the extant text, or any reconstruction yet proposed: all deviate entirely from the metrics of Josephus). In The Josephus Testimonium: Let’s Just Admit It’s Fake Already I summarize some key points of Hopper’s “A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus,” in Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, eds., Linguistics and Literary Studies: Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers (de Gruyter 2014), 147–69. This is alone fatal to Schmidt’s case, as Hopper refuted Schmidt’s entire argument years before it was even made.

Schmidt also ignores my specific refutation of exactly Schmidt’s kind of argument in On the Historicity of Jesus (“Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana,” §8.9 in On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 332–42). I also presciently say more in my new book, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus (see pp. 49–56 and 363–70), even though I only received Schmidt’s book after completing it, so I could only address it in a brief note—everything else there was written before even knowing Schmidt’s study existed. Schmidt couldn’t have seen my forthcoming work of course. But he certainly should have consulted the leading peer reviewed studies on the historicity of Jesus in any Oxford study on the historicity of Jesus. And not only mine (published with Sheffield-Phoenix in 2014), but also Lataster’s (published with Brill in 2019: in which see pp. 192–202, and 36–38). Schmidt only tries to take on my unrelated case for the James passage being tampered with, not my case against the Testimonium.

But ignoring Hopper is more devastating. As is Schmidt’s casually dismissive treatment of G.J. Goldberg (whom he at least mentions), which illustrates why this is a work of apologetics and not legitimate scholarship. I summarized Goldberg’s most crucial paper before, and his followup I critiqued in Goldberg’s Attempt to Rehabilitate the Testimonium Flavianum. But both papers essentially refute Schmidt’s argument, which entirely depends on Josephus not having uncritically cribbed straight from the Gospel of Luke. Because that entails Josephus had no reliable sources and cannot be an independent source for Jesus at all (destroying all of Schmidt’s hopes and dreams). Goldberg’s demonstration that the TF is a paraphrase of Luke is thorough and devastating, and Schmidt essentially ignores all of it, dismissing it with flippant and fallacious apologetics rather than any real scholarly engagement.

For those unfamiliar: Goldberg shows that the TF contains twenty points of parallel with Luke 24, all but one in the same order, and accounting for all of its content. The probability of that occurring by chance is as near to zero as makes no odds. In his second paper Goldberg argues that Luke 24 was adapted following Josephan paraphrase technique, which if true, thoroughly refutes Schmidt, but even if false still refutes him, as the paraphrase technique on display in the TF was actually typical for ancient authors, and thus refutes even Schmidt’s attempt to handwave his results away with insipid arguments like “if Josephus had” just paraphrased Luke then “one would think that there would be at least some explicit phraseology shared.” That is precisely the argument Goldberg refutes: in his first paper he finds at least seventeen shared words (more than the eleven shown in this linked table—and all particular, some telltale), which is far from “none”; and in his second paper he shows why any more explicit sharing than that is not an expected outcome of a paraphraser.

Anyone versed in the field of mimetic studies (and I provide an up-to-date bibliography on p. 29 of my new book) knows that “explicit” lifts only occur when the author specifically intends this to be recognized to make a point. Most paraphrasers have the opposite motivation, being trained in schools of the time that just directly copying someone is bad style and reflects a gauche failure as an author. Schmidt tries to claim otherwise by saying Josephus lifted more direct material from the Letter of Aristeas (p. 141), but that’s not relevantly true. Goldberg shows the transformations of the TF from Luke 24 are entirely comparable to those from Aristeas, particularly when you account for the fact that the latter involves a longer stretch of material (so, rate of direct borrowing, rather than absolute count, is the only relevant metric), and in his adaptation of Aristeas Josephus is all but quoting and actually naming his source, and thus is not producing original content using a source but specifically respecting a source, none of which occurs in the TF and therefore its effects cannot be expected there.

Ignoring the actual evidence and arguments of Hopper and Goldberg and replacing their results with fallacious comparisons instead could perhaps be dismissed as just more lazy “business as usual” in this field. But the specific ways Schmidt treats the data suggests a behavior more censurable.

• Some Examples of Vocabulary

For example, one way Schmidt dismisses Goldberg is with the claim (on pp. 141, 198, etc.) that the TF contains “language not used by early Christians, such as the terms ‘having the third day’, or that Jesus worked ‘incredible’ or ‘magical deeds’, or that he taught men who receive ‘truisms’ with ‘pleasure’, or that Christians were a ‘tribe’,” all of which is false. Every single one of those things is a typical Christian assertion, sometimes even using identical wording, other times some paraphrase of it. And authors, even forgers, tended to want to be original, or to emulate the target author’s style, either of which explains this data. Indeed that’s how we can tell authors apart stylometrically: by the fact that they don’t use exactly the same vocabulary and idioms as their peers. Schmidt is thus arguing directly against the entire point of identifying an author’s distinctive style, which any author of the TF will have (obviously, as they are a distinct author, whether Josephus or not). An expert in the field should know that. For Schmidt to blow past this as if he didn’t know it (and as if his readers should be kept from knowing it) is disturbing. This is not the kind of thing peer reviewers should miss. Schmidt’s entire point here is methodologically invalid.

And that’s on already-known background knowledge (see Bart Ehrman’s study of ancient forgery, or any modern study of ancient literary technique and composition-level education). Thus it is dubious to the point of disingenuous for Schmidt to claim these are unexpected from a Christian hand. The Christian use of “tribe” and “pleasure” and Schmidt’s bogus translation of “true things” as “truisms” I’ll discuss later (as those are even more egregious examples of Schmidt’s disinformation methodology). The rest is simply contrary to what Schmidt claims.

• Incredible Magical Deeds

Exactly contrary to Schmidt’s assertion (pp. 226–27), Christians routinely used the words paradoxôn (amazing, surprising) and ergôn (deeds, works), even for the miracles of Jesus. Especially Eusebius, in the most suspicious intro ever written (practically a thesis statement for the TF) declaring “it had been foretold that one who was at the same time man and God should come and dwell in the world and perform wonderful works” (History of the Church 1.2.23) using paradoxôn ergôn poiêtên, the exact sequence of three words we find in the TF, “and show himself a teacher to all nations,” using the exact same word for teacher that also shows up in the TF. Likewise both the TF and Eusebius’s introduction say the same things in different words: Jesus was a teacher to all ethnicities, not just the Jews, and died under the early Roman Empire, and rose from the dead. And both this and the TF follow that with a reminder that Jesus fulfilled prophecy. The TF looks like just a reworked attempt to make something sound like Josephus saying all the same things. This is almost as smoking-gun as you can get.

Indeed Eusebius loves the phrase paradoxôn ergôn (HC 9.7.4; Demonstratio 3.2.8, 3.5.65, 3.5.108, 3.5.109, 3.7.26, 9.6.3, 9.8.11; Commentary on Isaiah 1.41.106, 1.63.25; and many more) even the full phrase poiêtên paradoxôn ergôn (Demonstratio 3.2.8, 3.5.59, 3.5.103, 3.7.4; and many more). Other Christians liked these words, too, like John Chrysostom, Didymus the Blind, and so on (you’ll find many examples in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae). But do you know who didn’t? Josephus. I searched those three words together and found (apart from the TF) Eusebius is the first author to ever use them together, and often. See the TLG screenshot to the right, which includes Eusebius’s three different quotations of the TF, leaving seven more instances; and Schmidt correctly says there are nine: two more than shown here spread the words out but form the same phrase. The same follows for just the two words paradoxôn poiêtên. Only paradoxôn ergôn was a commonplace in Greek. Several authors used it; but Josephus, never. Schmidt insists Eusebius was inspired to this love of these words by the TF itself (pp. 226–27), but there is no reason to believe that—that Eusebius loves every combination of these words that Josephus never used any combination of (nor any other author before Eusebius) has a far more probable explanation in their being Eusebian, not Josephan.

So how can Schmidt claim this is an un-Christian phrase when it is not only a common Christian phrase in the very century the TF is suspected of being forged in, but is explicitly a popular Eusebian phrase—the actual lead suspect in the forgery of the TF? How was this allowed to be published by Oxford University Press? Such a specious dismissal of the obvious trend in the data would not pass competent review in any other field. But more to the point: can you trust a man who does this? What else in Schmidt’s book is like this? Where else are you being manipulated by clever wording to think something contrary to the data?

Oh.

Just wait.

• Having the Days

Another damning example is Schmidt’s false claim about “having” a third day (p. 100)—even apart from the fact that Goldberg argues the contrary of Schmidt’s point here (Goldberg 1995, pp. 9–10): that this formula paraphrases a similar idiom in Luke 24:21 (simply swapping agô for echô). The idea of “three days / third day” is quintessentially Christian; and the expression of “having” (echôn) a number of days is literally in the Gospel of John (11:17) and in respect to the same subject (resurrection—there, of Lazarus), and the exact phrase “having the third day” (τρίτην ἡμέραν ἐχούσης, describing the resurrection of Drusiana) appears in the Acts of John, either of which one can easily picture influencing a Christian author’s style. Schmidt “forgets” to tell us about John 11:17, and buries the Acts of John in a footnote, dismissing it with the irrelevant point that the phrase there (the same three words in the TF) wasn’t used of Jesus but someone else’s resurrection (as it is in John 11), which is not an academically valid argument: that the Acts of John intended with that phrase an allusion to Jesus is obvious, but for the origin of the idiom, it makes no difference whether it was ever used of Jesus. It’s a well-established Christian idiom for referring to a resurrection.

Meanwhile, the examples Schmidt gives of this idiom in Josephus in every case lack the actual idiom. And when you add this fact to the other, this all looks suspiciously like data fraud to me.

Perhaps someone who can’t read the Greek on Schmidt’s page might miss this, but Antiquities 5.327 refers to things happening on each of several days, not at the end of them (so, it is a contrary idiom); Antiquities 6.174 lacks the word “day” altogether and unlike the TF is a dative participle construction (so, it is a different idiom); and Antiquities 7.1 refers to days passing, not an event happening on the last of them: αὐτοῦ δύο ἡμέρας ἔχοντος ἐν τῇ Σικέλλα τῇ τρίτῃ, “after he had two days, on the third day” a thing happened (paraphrasing the Septuagint text of 2 Sam. 1:1–2), which is opposite the idiom used in the TF (Josephus instead uses autos, “he had,” and does not mean something happened on the second day; while to say which day it happened on, he uses the standard dative construction not present in the TF: τῇ τρίτῃ, “on the third” day). So even the data Schmidt presents and claims supports him, actually refutes him. It seems unlikely that Schmidt could be so incompetent as not to notice this. But either way, how did both reviewers miss this?

Indeed much of what Schmidt says about this is false (p. 100) in all the usual ways: like distorting or misrepresenting Goldberg’s points about these words, giving examples that don’t illustrate Schmidt’s point while claiming they do, and omitting information that destroys his thesis. It’s also fallacious. Even if Josephus liked this idiom (he didn’t—he never uses it even once, and instead preferred distinctly contrary idioms), a forger might have used it for exactly that reason: to try and make it sound more like Josephus than themselves. But Josephus never uses the idiom. He does use things almost like it, so a lazy emulator could easily fudge what shows up in the TF, mistaking it as a Josephanism (something Josephus wouldn’t do). But “having a day” as a span of time was a commonplace in ancient Greek. So any author merely trying not to sound like themselves could easily choose it. And given that this exact idiom in relation to resurrection is a Christianism (Acts of John), indeed even canonical (John 11:17), its presence here is actually evidence of forgery—not, as Schmidt falsely avers, against.

In academic reality, Hopper’s grammatical and discourse analysis alone refutes Schmidt’s entire thesis, and Goldberg’s studies topple every inference Schmidt wants to get to by proving that if Josephus wrote the TF, he did so by just slavishly and uncritically paraphrasing Luke’s Gospel, conclusively disproving any chance that Josephus had any real source for Jesus. Schmidt tries to escape these consequences by essentially fabricating a false narrative about the “language” of the TF from maliciously or incompetently massaged data, such that when you correct all his false statements and put back in all the data he left out, you get exactly the opposite result. Olson and Hopper are clearly correct: Josephus cannot have written the TF; only a Christian forger could. And Goldberg is clearly correct: it can only have been someone slavishly paraphrasing Luke 24 in their own words, or words they mistakenly thought were Josephan—and therefore not someone using reliable independent sources. And the culprit here looks definitely Christian, and pretty much exactly like Eusebius.

Schmidt thus operates not like a legitimate scholar, but more like a slimy defense lawyer, distorting and omitting information in order to fabricate a false acquittal for his man. Apologetics, not scholarship.

And though I have caught out specific examples of this (and more are to come), I should pause to mention the general invalidity of the entire methodology here: by simply trying to cobble up some apologetics “for” all the evidence that the TF is un-Josephan to be incorrectly reimagined as Josephan, time and again alternative hypotheses are not properly compared. For example, Schmidt presents a bogus “statistical” analysis (on pp. 112–22) that “forgets” to compare the same expectancies for alternative hypotheses. For example, he doesn’t run the same analysis for the alternative hypothesis that Eusebius wrote the TF, so as to compare its predictive success. Nor does he run it for the most plausible alternative: that Eusebius wrote it while trying to sound like Josephus (which will produce Josephanisms intermixed with more Eusebianisms than any authentic text of Josephus), or at least not like himself (which will produce non-Eusebianisms intermixed with more Eusebianisms than any authentic text of Josephus). There is a lot else that’s suspicious about this statistical analysis (I’d be curious to see experts like Gregor and Blais analyze it). But what I’ve pointed out alone nullifies its results (indeed experts are already telling me that all Schmidt has uncovered here is Zipf’s Law which cannot prove any author for the TF). Why did no peer reviewer make note of this? How did this pass review? Could it be that they themselves are Christian apologists who don’t understand what a proper comparative statistical study is supposed to look like?

When you go through Schmidt’s book, always ask yourself at each point, for each argument, if he is properly comparing his hypothesis to the best alternatives, or if he is just engaging rhetoric to push his hypothesis. The former is real scholarship. The latter is mere apologetics.

The Godfrey Analysis

There is a running series on this book by Neil Godfrey at Vridar, and more entries may or may not be to come (his latest suggests he is tiring of the project, and I sympathize), but what there is is sufficiently damning, and demonstrates my overall point. This starts in “Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” by Schmidt – Review 1 – ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’ (21 June 2025), which observes that Schmidt wants to argue that the Testimonium Flavianum is a “neutral” text, neither praising nor hostile—despite it being obviously in every line fawning praise by every standard of ancient rhetoric. As Godfrey concludes, Schmidt can only get there with a massive accumulation of “ad hoc scenarios to explain why we should be convinced” of this, which renders his thesis cumulatively improbable.

This is a common error from apologists: mistaking a long series of “just so” stories to explain away the evidence as “evidence” that ups the probability they are right, when in fact it catastrophically tanks that probability, by requiring we believe a thousand improbable things in order to believe one thing probable. Which gets the logic of evidence exactly backwards. Schmidt’s entire book is constructed on this framework. Which means its thesis cannot follow no matter what his book contains. He could double its size with a hundred more “just so” stories and that would only make its thesis even less probable, not more so. The book’s method itself is invalid, an exercise in apologetics, not scholarship.

But let’s look at some examples, things Schmidt improperly labels “evidence.”

First, in general, Godfrey is right. The overall thrust of Schmidt’s book consists of running a contentious line-by-line series of “just so” stories to completely reinterpret the obvious sense of the text into some bizarre freak-text that Josephus would never have recognized. For example, Schmidt’s thesis depends on us understanding that the phrase “if one ought to call him a man” was meant to “sarcastically suggest” Jesus may have been a demon (pp. 71–72, 206–07)—which doesn’t really understand how sarcasm works. But it certainly entails a failure to understand that being sarcastic is not being neutral. Schmidt is thus contradicting himself: he wants this text to be neutral; but all his absurd argumentation is that it is viciously mocking. Which is not neutral. But Schmidt is also simply mistranslating the Greek. If no ancient Christian author ever noticed Josephus was mocking them (and they didn’t; they all took every sentence and the whole composition as praising), how likely is it that Schmidt alone is reading the Greek correctly and dozens of native speakers weren’t?

By itself that would not prove he’s wrong, but it raises a red flag. It warrants checking his facts. And when you do, his every argument for accepting his bizarre readings of Josephus falls apart.

Godfrey finds example after example of this failure-mode repeated across Schmidt’s book. See (so far) Review 2 – ‘a teacher of . . . truisms’ (23 June 2025), Review 3 – ‘received with pleasure’ (25 June 2025), Review 4 – ‘he led astray many’? (6 July 2025), and Review 5A – ‘the placement of the Testimonium Flavianum’ (26 July 2025).

In §2, Godfrey proves “Schmidt is simply flat wrong” to argue that the phrase “teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly” should be read “as depicting the followers of Jesus loving trite banalities,” and therefore Josephus was mocking the followers of Jesus rather than, as is more obvious, describing them reverently (much less neutrally, as Schmidt is supposed to be arguing). Godfrey is right. Indeed his entire analysis is solid. And he proves all of Schmidt’s data are essentially fraudulent: not a single example that he claims evinces his point, does; and Godfrey adduces dozens more, proving no examples even exist for Schmidt to cite.

Schmidt uses other tactics here like arguing “sometimes” the words ‘teacher’ or ‘pleasure’ can be used negatively, “therefore” they are meant negatively here. Which contradicts his thesis that this passage is supposed to be neutral. But more importantly, this is a straight up fallacy of false equivalence. When those words are used negatively they are always indicated that way by context; no such context exists here. So we should draw the opposite conclusion: that they are not meant negatively here. If you know I often mean by the word “dog” a latch because I indicate every such time that I do mean a latch and not the animal, it cannot follow that I mean latch and not the animal when I don’t indicate that by context. You should instead conclude from the data that I don’t mean latch when I don’t indicate that I am. Because the word usually means the animal. And even I use it that way most of the time. So Schmidt’s argument is both blatantly fallacious (which should never pass peer review) and based on blatantly false premises (which should never pass peer review). As in this case: “truths” never means mockable banalities, not in any author close in time to Josephus, nor anywhere in Josephus. And there is no context to establish such a sense in the TF (as Godfrey explains in §3).

Even adding the reception of these truths “with pleasure” does not signify what Schmidt wants. When the lead suspect in forging the TF, Eusebius, refers to “divine” pleasure (hedonê theia) so reverently he is lost for words (Commentary on the Psalms 23.684.60, see screencap to the right), we can tell he means it in a positive sense (and that’s a clear-cut example of a Christian using that word in a positive sense). And when he elsewhere criticizes a “pleasure of the flesh” (hedonê sarkôn) we can tell he means it in a negative sense. In the TF, this reception is something its author wants you to believe was prophesied by God and coming from not only “a wise man” but God’s own “messiah.” That sounds like a positive spin to me. It’s certainly not a negative one. This looks exactly like Eusebius using it in the sense of a divine pleasure.

These kinds of arguments are also fundamentally circular: you have to assume Schmidt’s conclusion is true in order to “reinterpret” the words of Josephus so as to prove his conclusion true. Because otherwise this is always grating against the evidence: if Josephus meant to say something mocking or sarcastic (or even “neutral,” a conclusion Schmidt rarely actually argues for), he would have written every one of these sentences very differently. We know what his sarcastic or negative passages look like (we even know what his neutral or ambivalent passages look like). And they do not look like this. Of course, the Testimonium Flavianum does not look like Josephus in any way at all. It does not match his verbal idiom (Olson). It does not match his grammar or discourse style (Hopper). And it looks in no way like how Josephus describes sects or messianic pretenders, which is strange for a passage that is supposed to be doing both (and of which, together, we have over half a dozen examples to compare, yet the TF is completely alien to them). But it does match the idiom of Eusebius and the content and structure of Christian creeds and the Emmaus narrative in Luke and the content and style of Eusebius’s introduction.

I think any honest person can do the math here. Certainly any competent person can. But Schmidt is abandoning the correct methodology here altogether: he should be showing verbal and structural similarities with other Josephan passages of neutrality or sarcasm and verbal and structural deviations from other Josephan passages of praise or positivity. Schmidt never does this. The one thing that is the only correct way to get his result. He plays fallacious word games instead, and works over every argument like an amateur apologist rationalizing an absurd position, rather than a scholar seriously testing a hypothesis. Where are the comparisons with how Josephus usually describes sects like the TF does? Where are the comparisons with how Josephus describes every other messianic pretender like the TF does? This data (the most important data of all) is omitted, and replaced with apologetical rhetoric.

For example, as Godfrey points out in §4, “after acknowledging that the word” for bringing people over to your side, epagomenos, “does not have any intrinsic negative flavour, Schmidt must demonstrate that for Josephus” and the Testimonium in particular, “this common rule did not apply.” And yet even the examples Schmidt leans on from Fernando Bermejo-Rubio don’t exist. As Godfrey shows, every instance of epagomenos in Josephus that is supposed to carry a negative sense doesn’t. Nor do any of the studies cited in support of this speculation survive scrutiny (Godfrey smartly checks them all and shows you this). So there are no examples, not the “many” that Bermejo-Rubio and Schmidt claim.

There are in fact no comparable examples of epagomenos in the required sense anywhere, not just in Josephus. Bermejo-Rubio might at least say that such a word can be present in a negative text, i.e. if the context clearly establishes the author’s disapproval, but not that the word itself has any negative connotation. Which would be entirely correct. In fact, that would be the only correct thing that could be said here. Schmidt ignores this, the only correct thing to say, and says what is instead entirely incorrect. This could be incompetence (whereby Schmidt just can’t do logic and doesn’t understand how the Greek or any language works). Or it could be fraud (whereby Schmidt is creating a smokescreen he hopes no one will explore, to hide the fact that his argument is just smoke). You’ll have to come to your own conclusion about that. I certainly have mine.

But to illustrate the kind of games I’m talking about here: in one instance Schmidt cites (on p. 81) an obscure article in Spanish by Antonio Cernuda, which briefly says some claim that epagomenos is negative in sense, and then appends a footnote documenting scholars concluding that “this meaning of the verb is not supported by any evidence.” This source is therefore denying Schmidt’s point. Yet Schmidt cited it as supporting it. And I know this because Godfrey spent the hours tracking these things down, and I verified his work. Now just think of the effort here. For thousands of references. Readers are trusting a scholar’s citations to be relevant and legitimate and actually support the point raised. That trust was violated here (as in many other instances; Godfrey documents enough, but there are more). Is Schmidt counting on this being too time consuming, so that no one will discover things like this? Or was Schmidt so incompetent he did not even notice it himself? Your call.

In Godfrey’s last entry (§5A) he points out that apologetical attempts to argue that a Christian would never place the Testimonium where it is always falter on suppositions that would not be at all salient to its forger. In the language of the street we call that “a dumb idea.” Not a scholarly argument. In point of fact, to someone like Eusebius, this is exactly where it would best go. The Christian myth blamed Pilate’s famed ease to injustice for the execution of Jesus (his name was even baked into the very creed of Christianity for that reason, and as Hopper proved, the TF exhibits the structure of a Christian creed). And Christians always emphasized the Jewish elite’s tumult as motivating them to wheedle Pilate into doing that. The Jews are always the bad guys. And Pilate was just doing what he always did.

So where do you think a Christian would insert this paragraph? Perhaps at the end of a list of Pilate’s other disturbing actions? Perhaps ideally right before where the authentic text then describes it as putting the Jews in tumult? Such that it is then immediately followed by a religious scandal abroad—involving pagans and Jewish corruption, and thus now serving as a contrast to the glorious story of Jesus? There is actually no more ideal place to insert the TF. The problem is that, while this makes perfect sense to a Christian because they have all these assumptions in mind (Jews are always bad, and tricked Pilate into killing Jesus, and Christianity thereby threw the Jews into a tumult), they forgot to spell out any of those assumptions in the text. So the text we have makes no sense coming from Josephus. Josephus would have to explain why any of this is happening. What exactly about anything he says even explains Pilate killing Jesus? Christians knew the story. But Josephus could not assume his readers did. Likewise, where is the tumult? That’s in the Gospels and Acts (which the Christian can just assume as background to anything they write), but not here. What did Jesus teach? Josephus would not leave that a blank. But a Christian could, because they already know. And so on (see my line-by-line analysis repeatedly proving this in OHJ, §8.9).

All the way down the line, nothing here makes sense coming from Josephus, especially its placement in his text—yet would make perfect sense to a Christian like Eusebius, both as written and where placed. Schmidt’s argument thus simply ignores the entire case against him, pretending it doesn’t exist, and that it can be defeated by dumb gainsaying that even an attentive high school student could dispatch. This is bad. It’s almost Josh McDowell bad. It’s only elevated by a scholarly formatting of the text and a padded bibliography and citation style. But its content is specious, merely dressed up to look substantive.

Another example of this is how, ironically, Schmidt relies a lot on the arguments of Bermejo-Rubio, without accepting the consequences of Bermejo-Rubio’s argumentation, which is that Jesus was in fact a violence-endorsing rebel leader (which I have already pointed out is not likely to be the case but is more plausible than anything Schmidt is claiming), and so (Bermejo-Rubio concludes) the TF was originally a hostile text edited down by Christians to remove its hostility. Bermejo-Rubio doesn’t engage in such blatantly specious apologetics as Schmidt. Bermejo-Rubio’s methods are inadvertently apologetical, but he is still a serious scholar and not a disingenuous propagandist. He knows the text we have cannot mean the things Schmidt wants, and thus advances a far more plausible argument: that all the context Josephus would have given that would make this clear was removed by a Christian editor.

Schmidt disregards that, the only competent conclusion there can be here (that that context would be here if his hypothesis were true, yet is not). And yet much of even that competent argument has already been refuted by Chrissy Hansen’s “A Negative Testimonium? A Response to Fernando Bermejo-Rubio,” in New Testament Studies 71.1 (2025), 56–63. Which refutes Schmidt all the more (likewise in an article against the even stranger argument of David Allen which I also debunked). And ironically, so does Bermejo-Rubio, who refutes Schmidt’s claim that the text can ever have been “neutral” in “Was the Hypothetical Vorlage of the Testimonium Flavianum a ‘Neutral’ Text?,” in the Journal for the Study of Judaism 45 (2014), 326–65, the very paper Schmidt mines data from but ignores the conclusion of. Yet that is the very argument Hansen refutes. So if she has dispatched the stronger argument of Bermejo-Rubio, she has all the more dispatched the weaker argument of Schmidt. And so has, in turn, Bermejo-Rubio. Schmidt is thus already standing on a multiply refuted argument and just trying to hide that behind word games.

Godfrey has merely documented instance after instance of Schmidt’s refuted approach. He has thus also demonstrated Schmidt uses what look to me like shady tactics of misrepresenting the data, and even his own sources, to build a false narrative rather than confess the truth of what the undistorted data actually signify. Just as I myself found. All apologetics, no genuine scholarship.

The Mason Analysis

Another example is Schmidt’s intolerable abuse of his sources and evidence regarding the use of the word “tribe” (phylon) in the TF. Again he omits all the actual data in the scholars whose results he wants to denounce (or erase), and replaces it with bogus data, in order to generate a false result. As with every other case, Schmidt’s “alternative” data is all technically “true” (he never outright “fabricates” anything), but is cherry-picked to cast a false light. And if any scientist did that it would still be called out as data manipulation and grounds for retraction and public shame.

This case is like every other: that the TF’s use of phylon is un-Josephan was actually proved by Steve Mason (in Josephus and the New Testament, 169–70). A more recent scholar to point this out is again Ken Olson. But Mason is more detailed. His argument is that “it is very strange that Josephus should speak of the Christians as a distinct racial group, since he has just said that Jesus was a Jew condemned by Jewish leaders,” whereas we know “some Christian authors of a later period came to speak of Christianity as a ‘third race’,” neither Jew nor Gentile (or a fourth race, neither Jew, Gentile, or Barbarian).

Mason is right. This is a Christian idiom. And it violates well-documented Josephan idioms. Schmidt erases this data and result by a number of shady devices, replacing it with falsehoods and fallacies, in order to reach the opposite conclusion. Readers who didn’t know the data Mason referenced could easily be duped by Schmidt’s presentation–because he never shows them any of it. But, like all Christian apologetics, as soon as you put back in what Schmidt left out, his conclusion is reversed.

Let’s see what I mean.

Schmidt admits “tribe of Christians” is a phrase that occurs twice elsewhere in Eusebius (both the same line, repeated: pp. 225–26, cf. pp. 105–07, 110), and though he says scholars argue “Eusebius uses the term in the Ecclesiastical History under the influence of a source,” Mason and Olson’s point was actually “that Eusebius uses the term independent of Josephus,” so any Christian source it derives from establishes their point. But their point is even stronger than that. Because in Church History 3.33.2 and 3.33.4 it is in fact Eusebius’s own style we are reading: for he is translating a text that has no such idiom. The idea of calling the Christians “a tribe” (phylon) is thus from Eusebius himself.

This evinces not only that this is Eusebian style, but that Eusebius loves this moniker so much he even introduced it into his translation of a source that lacked it (and so, we can expect, he would do it again—like, say, when paraphrasing Luke 24 while trying somewhat ineptly to sound like Josephus). Compared to the evidence in Josephus, which shows no plausible tendency to use phylon for what the TF describes as a Jewish sect, this becomes evidence against Josephus as the author and supporting Eusebius as its forger. This fact has essentially been erased by Schmidt’s manipulation of words and data, thus hidden from his readers and peers.

With this information, Schmidt’s argument (p. 107) starts to look outright fraudulent:

The term ϕῦλον would also be puzzling coming from a Christian interpolator, since it would require the Christian to insert a possibly derogatory term into the TF. Given all of this, it makes the most sense that the phrase ‘tribe of the Christians’ comes from the hand of Josephus and not a later Christian interpolator.

And yet Eusebius chose to “insert” that word into Trajan’s letter to Pliny, disproving Schmidt’s first point, while all of Mason’s evidence that this would be even weirder for Josephus to do disproves his second point. We are never told about Mason’s evidence. Likewise Schmidt’s whole notion that phylon is “possibly” derogatory was already disproved by Olson anyway (this is the same bogus abuse of grammar that Godfrey catalogued as typical from Schmidt). But here Schmidt claims no Christian would thus use it. Yet Eusebius happily used it. So how was Schmidt allowed to claim he doesn’t? He knows the Eusebian passages disprove his own assertion. So why is he pretending they don’t? His peer reviewers should have asked that question. That they didn’t is why we can no longer trust Oxford’s review process when it comes to Christian propaganda like this.

It’s also the case that Eusebius uses the word “tribe” hundreds of times (he loves that word) and Josephus only eleven times (and only nine relevantly, always in reference to a biological race, not an ideological group). And the phrase “tribe of Christians” appears nowhere else in the entirety of ancient literature except in Eusebius’s translation of Trajan. That is damned suspicious even by itself. When combined with all the other clues and examples of Eusebian authorship it becomes suspiciously damning. But we never hear of this from Schmidt, nor get any response to it. He appears to deliberately hide it from us (p. 106) by claiming Eusebius is just “quoting” Trajan when in fact he is not. Schmidt then implies maybe Eusebius is quoting Tertullian (pp. 224–25), but that is also false and self-defeating to claim.

That claim is false because Tertullian wrote that Trajan rescripsit hoc genus inquirendos quidem non esse, “wrote that this race should certainly not be inquired after” (Apology 2.7), while Trajan actually wrote qui Christiani ad te delati fuerant…conquirendi non sunt, “the Christians reported to you are not to be rounded up” (so the Christian Tertullian is also stating what Trajan said in Tertullian’s own words, not quoting him) and Eusebius wrote τὸ τῶν Χριστιανῶν φῦλον μὴ ἐκζητεῖσθαι, which if back-translated into Latin would be Christianorum genus non quaerandum, “the race of Christians are not to be searched for,” which matches what neither Trajan nor Tertullian wrote (so Eusebius is also describing what Trajan said in his own words, and under no apparent influence from Tertullian). So Eusebius is not quoting some Greek translation of Tertullian’s rephrasing of Trajan.

Schmidt’s claim is also self-defeating because even if we accept the “Eusebius used Tertullian” supposition here, Tertullian gladly used the word genus (tribe, race) in describing what Trajan said, and another Christian happily translated that with phylon, which also disproves Schmidt’s claim that a Christian would never do this, and establishes that in fact it is Christians that do this. Schmidt even admits (p. 105) that the Latin genus corresponds more to the Greek genos (“race”) which had always been a canonical way for Christians to refer to themselves (1 Peter 2:9) and became popular (Epistle to Diognetus 1.1; Aristides, Apology 2). Therefore many Christians, all the way to Tertullian—not pagans or Jews—were happy to describe themselves as another race; and either Eusebius was happy to render that with the word phylon, or some other Christian was, and Eusebius happy to retain it. So all of Schmidt’s evidence refutes him—even his own purely speculated evidence refutes him. Which is typical for Christian apologetics, but has no place in an Oxford study.

So when Schmidt says “these two instances cannot be attributed to Eusebius (or Tertullian) since they are summaries of a non-Christian’s words” that statement is false, and in my opinion fraudulent. They are not summaries of non-Christian “words.” They are Christian restatements of what non-Christians said, in which the Christians are inserting their own words, “tribe of Christians,” in reflection of their own desire and idiom. This is true even of Schmidt’s citation of the medieval author Sozomen, who again is not quoting any actual non-Christian but relating in his own words a Christian-composed hagiographic persecution legend (with such obvious resemblance to the same persecution story in Daniel as to beggar belief that it ever even happened—like most Christian persecution myths), and thus it is Sozomen (or, again, another Christian source) who chose to call the Christians a “tribe” (phylon).

That phrase does not exist in Trajan, the non-Christian source at issue for Eusebius, or anywhere outside Christian literature. Sozomen, for example, is not quoting a source when he calls Christians a phylon, but describing what it said in his own words, and he can’t have had anything but a Christian source to be quoting there anyway. This idiom comes solely from Christians—and indeed independently of each other, as Tertullian uses genus in a sentence Eusebius does not use at all, and Eusebius uses his favorite word phylon (not genos) in his own (or, speculatively, some other Christian’s) restatement of what Trajan said, and all to say something Mason establishes that Josephus would never say. For the TF does not describe Christians as a phylon in the way Josephus understood it; that is a peculiarly Christian way of talking about themselves. And Schmidt has all but lied about all of this, hiding it under repeatedly false statements of fact.

Even when Schmidt claims the “idea” of calling Christians a “tribe” (phylon) might come from the pagan Suetonius (another mere speculation), that has no effect on any fact just presented. First, Suetonius did not write “tribe of Christians” but Christiani genus hominum superstitionis, “Christians, a category of superstitious people,” which matches nothing in Tertullian or Eusebius (or Sozomen or 1 Peter or anything else) and thus cannot explain their texts, nor would their being influenced by Suetonius fail to still refute Schmidt, as they clearly liked and kept and used phylon that way—on their own (that word is not in Suetonius)—while Josephus still never uses phylon that way. So unlike the Christians here, he clearly wasn’t influenced by Suetonius or anyone else to use that word for something other than a race when describing people. We know he would instead have called them a sect (hairesis) or philosophy (philosophia), as he does the Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and so on. So Mason and Olson remain correct and Schmidt in every way incorrect. And he has simply hidden all this from his readers, peers, and reviewers.

It’s also worth noting that the line in Suetonius that Schmidt references might even have been written by a Christian. That’s not necessary to contemplate. All my previous points stand without it. But as I point out in OHJ, 349n112, citing Stephen Dando-Collins, The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and his City (2010), 6, and K.R. Bradley, “Suetonius, Nero 16.2: afflicti suppliciis Christiani,” Classical Review 22.1 (1972), 9-10, that line’s vocabulary is not only non-Suetonian, it is not even Latin usage in his century, but fits later Christian Latin. And the use of genus, following its popularization by Tertullian (and, as phylon, Eusebius), would then stand as additional evidence this line was written by a Christian, probably as a marginal note (which it exactly looks like) that became accidentally incorporated by later copyists. Especially if we’re to suppose this references knowledge of the Neronian persecution for the arson of Rome, as that would then make even less sense from Suetonius (“it’s hard to fathom why Suetonius would consider mass murderers to be a mere victim of public morals legislation,” Obsolete Paradigm, 82), yet makes perfect sense for a medieval Christian scholiast trying to annotate corroboration for the story in Tacitus, Orosius, the forged Letters of Seneca and Paul, and so on.

With the real data put back in, phylon is exclusively a Christian way of talking about themselves, it’s even particularly Eusebian, yet is definitely not how Josephus would have described them. Again, Schmidt presents faked-up data, hides the real data, and thereby generates a false result. And all through a manipulative wording of his arguments. Apologetics, not scholarship.

The Hansen Analysis

Chrissy Hansen responds to Schmidt as well. She catches numerous distortions and fallacies showing the same pattern of doctoring the data to create a false conclusion under the mere appearance of having made a sound argument. Hansen describes in detail how Schmidt fakes-up claims about what she did or did not argue and then tries to get around what she really argued with pseudo-reasoning—which you would not recognize as such, if you did not compare what she said with what he said, to see that, indeed, Schmidt has done this. So again it looks like Schmidt is creating a false narrative and replacing all the actual data and scholarship with that false narrative, and endeavoring to fool you into not discovering that he has done this. Which all looks disingenuous and cynical. How does this differ from Soviet-style historical revisionism?

To illustrate what I mean, I’ll just pick a few examples (see Hansen’s article for more, and more detail), and I will not be as charitable as Hansen, who thinks Schmidt was arguing in good faith and just making a bunch of mistakes. I cannot bring myself to believe that, as the number and nature of these “mistakes” is too great to have that excuse—unless you go all the way and conclude Schmidt’s error rate is so great as to wholly disqualify him as competent to address this question at all. But you can reach your own judgment about that.

Schmidt claims “Pseudo-Hegesippus and Eusebius both discuss John the Baptist while discussing Jesus” but “Hansen omits that Pseudo-Hegesippus discusses John after Jesus, just like Josephus does, but not like Eusebius” (p. 228). Yet Hansen responds: “In fact, the order in which narratives appear in Pseudo-Hegesippus is something I address at length in my paper,” which is Chris Hansen, “Reception of the Testimonium Flavianum,” New England Classical Journal 51.2 (2024), 50–75. Indeed, she devotes two whole pages to this point (56–57) and Schmidt does not mention or interact with hardly any of it. He seems to want you to think she wrote nothing for you to consider, and that therefore his argument refutes hers, when it’s the other way around: she already refuted the argument he is making, and he is pretending to his readers that that never happened, so he can just repeat the argument she refuted and drop mic (this is exactly the same tactic used repeatedly by my own critics). I struggle to see how Schmidt is being in any way honest here. His entire modus operandi looks like a con (like most Christian apologetics does).

It’s only the worse that even if Schmidt could overcome Hansen’s case that we cannot establish that Pseudo-Hegesippus was writing independently of the writings of Eusebius (and he can’t—her case is conclusive that this is at best unknowable on present data and at worst convincingly disproved), we still cannot establish that Pseudo-Hegesippus was writing independently of Eusebius’s manuscripts of Josephus. A key point I prove in my article on that subject—now available in my anthology Hitler Homer, but originally published as: Richard Carrier, “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20.4 (Winter 2012), 489–514 (the only work of mine Schmidt tries to answer, or even mentions—but not on this point, even though that means he knows I established this point)—is that all extant manuscripts of the Antiquities of Josephus must derive from the same manuscript used by Eusebius himself. So his argument cannot work even if he wasn’t falsely describing Hansen’s refutation of it.

In other words, Eusebius did not just “claim” the Testimonium Flavianum was in Josephus. That Testimonium was in his copy of Josephus—whether he put it there or someone at that same library before him did. I show the insertion must post-date Origen but pre-date the publications of Eusebius, which means the most likely culprits for inserting it are Eusebius himself or his tutor, Pamphilus, Eusebius’s predecessor in running the same library inherited from Origen. This means it is not enough to rule out that Pseudo-Hegesippus lifted his material from one of the books of Eusebius (and as Hansen really shows, we can’t even do that), because we also have to rule out that he lifted it from the same manuscript Eusebius used or any descendant of that manuscript. Since all extant manuscripts descend from it, odds are good that the manuscript used by Pseudo-Hegesippus did, too. So Schmidt cannot rescue his desired premise that Pseudo-Hegesippus affords us evidence of a manuscript tradition independent of Eusebius. So what he does instead is give you a false account of Hansen’s case, and deliberately omit any mention of my case (even though he read it and clearly wanted to refute what it said, so he can’t have “overlooked” this), and then present you with an argument we already refuted, hoping you never find out that he is supplying you a false narrative of the scholarship and evidence.

When this is coupled with fallacies and false premises, you get a specious work of dubious apologetics, not a serious scholarly study worthy of publication by Oxford University Press. For example, compare pp. 58–59 with 228–29 of Schmidt, and then note, for example—as Hansen does—that Carson Bay does list Eusebius repeatedly as a source for Pseudo-Hegesippus. And yet Schmidt appears to tell his readers that he doesn’t—unless “Bay does not mention Eusebius as a source” can have some other meaning in the English language that escapes me. It’s only worse that Schmidt cites for his false claim pp. 45–46 of Bay’s Biblical heroes and Classical Culture—which does not discuss this point. Bay discusses Ps.-Hegesippus’s use of Eusebius as an intermediary several pages later (cf. pp. 59–60). His earlier page was about his primary sources, not his secondary sources. Schmidt has either lazily or deliberately misread what Bay was saying (and Hansen confirmed this by actually asking Bay).

If this unconscionable error is here, how many others are there across Schmidt’s book? All the examples across my article indicate the number is likely to be a lot. A few would be fine. But at some point the immense number of these things becomes a pattern, not an occasional gaffe. Then regardless of why these “mistakes” exist, the consequence of their immense number remains the same: you cannot rely on anything Schmidt says to be true. You have to fact-check everything. Which renders his book useless. While the fact that so many of these mistakes are fatal to his argument renders his book worse than useless.

But once again, as with all the others, so with Hansen: Schmidt fakes-up the data, hides the real data, and misrepresents all the scholarship disproving his thesis. Apologetics, not scholarship.

Conclusion

We can only conclude that Schmidt is either phenomenally incompetent or deliberately publishing fraudulent scholarship (and his peer reviewers either unprofessionally lazy or in on the con). There is no other way to explain all this. A particularly telling example is when Schmidt claims it would be “odd” for a Christian interpolator to mention Jesus preaching successfully to Greeks because the Gospels don’t say that (p. 80). Indeed, Schmidt even implies the Gospels “say” he didn’t—by citing only Matthew, the lone Gospel that was specifically written to remove Gentile Christianity from the narrative. Mark and Luke have Jesus routinely preach to and win over Greeks (Mark even makes a point of emphasizing that Jesus’s Gentile mission was more successful: OHJ, §10.4), and Schmidt even admits this by giving examples, thus refuting his own statement in the very next sentence. “Golly. Where would a Christian forger get the idea that Jesus preached to and won over Greeks?” Well. The Gospels. Obviously. “But it seems exaggerated. Why would a Christian propagandist exaggerate?” Gosh. I wonder.

How peer reviewers allowed this blatantly self-contradictory, self-refuting argument remain here is the story of this entire book. It’s all like this: Christian apologetics, not legitimate scholarship; unvetted by any serious review. Schmidt even simultaneously claims Eusebius under-used the TF (to argue ‘so why would he forge it?’) and that Eusebius used the TF to argue this very point: that Jesus won over many Greeks (p. 18). So Schmidt even gives Eusebius a reason to forge this very point in the TF while simultaneously claiming he had no reason to do that, while at the same time claiming Eusebius can’t have forged it because he didn’t use it, while admitting (and presenting evidence) that he did use it, and for the very thing Schmidt claims needs explanation. This kind of self-contradictory argumentation is more popularly called “bullshit,” but more academically called “Christian apologetics.” It has no place in any Oxford University Press publication. This is more like the nonsense published by Zondervan or Answers in Genesis.

I am thus forced to conclude that Schmidt has not produced a work of legitimate scholarship, but mere propaganda, and Oxford University Press, whether by incompetence or design, was entirely complicit in this (and I am serious: I think this should be an investigated scandal as grave as The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up). Oxford’s reviewers failed to detect all the seeming research fraud and invalid methodologies the book deploys, from false statements about ancient grammar or literary practice to falsely misrepresenting the scholarship in the field and its actual data. Schmidt repeatedly cobbles-up bogus data in place of the real data. And every single trick like this skews his result toward his fantastical Christian objective (so it’s not random error). And this is snowing everyone who can’t believe he would do this or get away with it. But he did. I have provided dozens of examples, none trivial, of what looks to me like research fraud. Again, maybe it just “looks” like that and Schmidt is really just a sincere but wildly incompetent hack who is too delusional to realize everything he did. But Oxford’s reviewers should still have caught that—and they didn’t. Why?

Peer review is an important tool. But it loses its value when it is compromised by ideology and personal emotions and beliefs. And biblical studies is a captured field. Even its secular scholars are browbeaten, cowed, and trained to overlook Christian abuse of evidence and logic (examples, examples, examples). So anything published that aligns with Christian interests can be expected to exhibit a substantial false positive bias, while anything contrary to it can be expected to exhibit a substantial false negative bias. This does not mean the false positive and false negative rates are total. Good things against the grain will get through; and a lot of crankery, propaganda, and bad scholarship will be successfully filtered out. But too often good things against the grain will be filtered out and bad scholarship and propaganda will be filtered in. And this has gotten so bad that you can’t tell, just from whether a book is published, by, say, Oxford University Press, that it can be trusted. If it aligns with Christian propaganda, you have every right to be suspicious and worry the peer review process failed, even at Oxford. Whereas things against the grain probably were held to an absurd rather than a lax standard, and thus you have grounds to trust them more. Instead, good contrary work is more likely to be blocked from your view than poor Christian scholarship shoved into it. This asymmetry has to be recognized and taken seriously. Because here we have an undeniable example of it.

I say more on these points in A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research and On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus. And I discuss my own experience with peer review in The Kooky & Illogical Postflaviana Review. I am planning an article on the entire concept of peer review and the recognition now of a “peer review crisis” across all knowledge fields, not just this one. This one is just worse because this field has always been lacking in any clearly vetted methodology (leaving it more prone to abuse and failure), and has always been captured and influenced by Christian interests in a way no other field has. Still, the phenomenon is creeping across all fields now, where money, politics, crank fads, and system-gaming dominate more than Christianity. But it’s all a sign of the fact that we now live in a post-truth era. That is why rather than conclude this is a crisis and Schmidt’s work a fraud, I already know the reaction will be a bunch of shoot-the-messenger bullshit (“How dare you!”), instead of a retraction and calls for reform. And that will be the final proof that the system is in an unrecoverable failure-mode, and nothing it produces can be trusted anymore.

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For more examples, see my discussion of Schmidt’s apologetical response to my studies on the James passage in Josephus, in T.C. Schmidt on James in Josephus: Apologetics vs. History.