This video is now publicly available. I am keeping the original announcement below. But to watch see The Knowledge Nexus. The de-animated slides are available here (but the usual advisory: the slides are not the lecture, so don’t just read the slides and think you heard all the qualifiers, exceptions, qualifications, and expansions—you will only get that from the lecture; and the Q&A; and footnotes in comments here, like this).
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This Saturday I’ll be giving a free public lecture online: “Josephus on Jesus: How Likely Fake? A Bayesian Tutorial in Historical Reasoning.” I’ll analyze the two passages in Josephus supposedly mentioning Jesus using Bayesian techniques addressing all the usual arguments pro and con, as adapted from The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. With Q&A after.
Join us!
4:00 PM Eastern Time · Saturday, December 20, 2025
Join on Zoom then with this link.
Meeting ID: 741 855 9721
Passcode: 842915
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Making my way through the new book, but in regard to Josephus, I appreciated the comments about how it’s unlikely he would have referred to Jesus by name or referred to him as messiah. Made me think that an actual Josephan TF would have been something along the lines of ‘Around this time came the Nazarene, who made a show of himself arriving during Passover riding an ass to fulfill prophecy, but suffered the ultimate penalty under Pontius Pilate.’
I don’t think I said Josephus wouldn’t name him, per se, but rather, wouldn’t use the word Christ of him (because he assiduously and deliberately and repeatedly avoids saying that of any messianic pretender), and would instead have described him with the same insider cues as he does the other messianic pretenders (as making themselves out to be the second and final Joshua), and would have described the Christians the same way he describes every other sect (such as with an actual account of their beliefs, particularly in respect to Law, Metaphysics, and Resurrection).
Josephus would not have bought any of that other stuff. He might have framed it as what Christians say, but not as what happened.
Gotcha. Yes, on page 52 it reads (in regard to messianic pretenders) that “…Josephus conspicuously avoids ever using the word Christ or Jesus…”. I took this to mean that, rather than referring to an historical Jesus by name he would have instead described him as he does with “The Egyption” (such as, “The Nazarene”). Likewise, a reference to the Zechariah passage (for example) would provide that “insider cue” that he had actually paraded into Passover declaring himself king, leading to his execution as a pretender.
Oh, yes, you are right to point that out. Jesus (Joshua) is avoided in those other cases, and so one might expect it would be here.
My point was that Josephus omits explicit comparison to Joshua (as by stating that name) in those other cases, leaving it implicit (and unmistakable to Jewish readers and not Gentiles), hence he avoids “calling” any of them Joshua.
That would explain why we don’t have him naming them all Joshua. But one might have seen him choose to name one of them that way as the means in that case to draw the parallel (particularly if that was the name he was known under already, an apposite fit).
But I agree that’s still unlikely, as some historical act comparing with Joshua would be more to the point than just the name (which would not be Nazarene but something from the OT accounts of Joshua and his conquest), while just the name makes explicit what Josephus evidently usually wanted to keep implicit.
So yes, it’s not impossible he’d have used the name in this case (if the rest matched his usual trends in describing these New Joshua figures), but it is at least measurably less likely.
Thanks a lot for doing this, Dr. Carrier. The only way I see to rescue the mentions of Jesus in Josephus and Tacitus is by dating all Gospels to the 2nd century. Josephus and Tacitus would thus become the first to mention Jesus, and it would not be possible to argue they are dependent on the Gospels.
Assuming the passages were authentic. If they were faked in the 3rd or 4th century, then they are back to being post-Gospel.
Steve Mason argued in a recent mythvision video that at least some of the TF is authentic and Josephus was explaining to the Romans that he knew the christians and they were alright. Assuming the historicity of jesus and that he was crucified by the Romans, he was obviously some sort of troublemaker. By the 90s at least mark and Matthew were known and they portray the triumphal entry inspired by zechariah 9 and the cleansing of the temple by Jeremiah 7. Both situations could easily get someone killed in the Roman times. If Josephus is critical of messianic pretenders, believed vespasian to be the messiah and was writing to a roman audience, why would he praise christians?
Mason has never had a coherent position on the TF. See Mason on Josephus on James.
I think he always argues feelings rather than facts here, as in, he only says what he feels should be the case or wants to be the case, not what the evidence impels us to conclude is the case. There is never any logically valid argument from true premises in anything he has ever written about this.
We know the temple story is a fabrication because of the physical side of it and the fact there were guards present to stop such things. It would’ve taken a small army to do what Jesus was portrayed as doing. It’s telling that the story is connected to prophecy. The writers of the gospels were then compelled to enter the story because of it being foretold in Jeremiah 7
That’s all true. But IMO, as I show in OHJ (citing the study by Hamerton-Kelly), the story was invented symbolically, not because it was a prophecy Jesus had to fulfill. It’s simply fiction illustrating what the author thinks is why God allowed the Romans to destroy the temple and stay in power. It crucially connects intentionally with the “Jesus hates figs” story and the “it’s all about prayer now” denouement. Mark did not care whether the story was plausible, as he never cared about that (the fig story isn’t even plausible for a supernaturalist worldview, much less a naturalist one; so Mark was not even trying for plausibility).
“By the 90s at least Mark & Matthew were known” – what is the evidence? Do you mean as complete texts? What version of Mark?
This sounds fun. I’ve generally felt the strongest evidence against is the formal argument from silence. Origen, who goes out of his way to quote Josephus in defense of Christian History, never mentions either passage? That seems really unlikely. Missing the TF alone would take monumental ignorance.
And if he already thought Josephus was taking about the Lord’s brother in antiquities 20, he wouldn’t have to misattributed Hegesippus’ ideas onto Josephus. He could have just pointed out that Josephus validates James’ martyrdom, then make the connection to the fall of Jerusalem himself.
Indeed, and your reasoning leads to even more of a revelation than that. I’ll cover this Saturday!
Dr Carrier, in the post on Schmidt (8/9) you mentioned
I take it this is still to come?!
Indeed. I am hoping to get that done next month. It’s not a high priority. The case I summarized in the zoom already decisively refutes him. So writing an article would only be showing that. But it’s worth showing that.
Are the zooms libraried somewhere please?
Yes. See other comment. This one may be up in a few days or weeks.
I was looking forward to this zoom and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Many thanks Richard. Please do more (if you have time!)
Thank you!
These happen only because they are funded. So definitely throw thanks to the host, via their YouTube channel housing all the lectures I do with them (including, soon, this one).
Footnote: I had to be brief in the lecture (as it’s already an hour long with an hour of Q&A, but no one asked the following question), but near the end of the TF section I mention that none of the calculated evidence is dependent on the others.
There is one “sort of” exception that ends in the same place I do in the lecture but someone might want to see that walked out to understand it.
I treat the vocabulary and grammar/storytelling evidence separately. But technically these will have some dependency relation, since a forger who fails at one of those tasks is more likely to fail at the other, while a success at one of those tasks could cast a different light on the failure of the other.
The following explains why I skipped that in the lecture:
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The relation is not total and would only reflect a bottom-margin effect. At the a fortiori margin (the one I calculated), this small dependency effect is already accounted for; but you’d have to actually work it out at the a judicantiori margin.
On this demarcation of the error margins see Proving History pp. 85–88, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 599, and Obsolete Paradigm, pp. 154, 224, and Appendix.
But to illustrate how in this case any residual dependency relation is already factored in at the top and would factor in at the bottom, I provide the following:
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If all we had were the vocabulary incongruity, someone might say that’s weak evidence because “it could be a coincidence.”
That actually entails a low probability, which is what we have to mathematically account for, i.e. the 1/20 margin I assign there is already assuming this is correct, that “it’s just a coincidence.” That’s simply the frequency with which we estimate Josephus would himself fail at his own vocabulary tendencies, relative to how often a forger would.
So the 1/20 I assigned is literally the likelihood ratio given that hypothesis—in comparison to forgery, which all but entails this effect and thus this observation is far more “likely” on “forgery” than on “coincidence.” We are simply measuring that fact, by comparison to how often we think Josephus naturally conjoins a density of incongruous vocabulary like this.
But if we then showed someone the grammar/storytelling incongruities, they’d agree that makes the vocabulary argument for forgery stronger. Not only because two coincidences is less likely than one, but also because it’s harder for an author to muck their own grammar and storytelling tendencies (and harder for a forger to get those right) than for vocabulary. And this has to be reflected mathematically. So I reflect it in the 1/20 for this observation, making the combined observation much stronger, at a 1/400 likelihood.
This reflects the fact that Josephus might rarely conjoin so much incongruous vocabulary but retain his characteristic grammar and storytelling, while (conversely) a forger might nail his characteristic grammar and storytelling (in trying to sound like him, or in choosing a way of telling the story that just happens to resemble his) but muck up the vocabulary. So seeing both does amplify the unlikelihood.
And of course the grammar/storytelling might be ambiguous as well (neither clearly Josephan or un-Josephan) while the vocabulary remains incongruous or vice versa. So to have both failures together is much stronger evidence than having only one of them clearly observed. While having one failure and not the other leaves us in a weaker evidential position (where we are positing only one rather than two coincidences).
So these two categories of evidence are independent enough to get our a fortiori result. Because the one observation is not automatically caused by the other, and they are not always correlated.
But, for example, one might think this vocabulary incongruence is really 1/1000 unlikely and the grammar/storytelling incongruence 1/2000 unlikely (at the a judicantiori margin), but think that any forger who mucked the vocabulary would also be more likely to muck the grammar and storytelling as well, or vice versa.
Suppose that this correlation means that both combined will be found a thousand times more often than chance alone would predict. Chance alone predicts it will happen 1/000 × 1/2000 = 1/2,000,000 times. But if the conjunction is a thousand times more common than that, then it will happen 1/2,000 times.
That means every g-fail comes with a v-fail while only half of v-fails come with g-fails. But since g-fails can surely happen without v-fails (indeed it’s easier to fake the vocabulary), their conjunction cannot be a thousand times more common than chance.
Let’s say it’s 500 times more often. Then conjunctions occur 1/4,000 times. That means g-fails come with a v-fails half the time, while v-fails come with g-fails a quarter of the time. Which is as expected (an author is more likely to fail their own v than their own g).
But as these effects all fall below our a fortiori margin, they don’t affect it, as the a fortiori estimates have already accounted for this effect. But at the a judicantiori side we’d have instead of 1/1000 and 1/2000, either 1/1000 and 1/4 (accounting for the dependency effect from v to g) or 1/2000 and 1/2 (accounting for the dependency effect from g to v), either way getting 1/4000, not 1/2,000,000.
And these are just hypothetical numbers to illustrate the point. The actual correlation size and thus its effect on likelihoods would have to be actually calculated from a detailed study of how often the observed scale of v-fail and g-fail occurs in authentic Josephus material, and how often these two fails are found together. And the result of such a study will not likely be anywhere near our a fortiori estimate and thus won’t alter it (other than to demonstrate that it should be worse than even we assigned).