Seems too speculative to be useful. But if there is a specific claim in there you mean to ask about, do quote that here.

All reasonable.

To be fair: they could be weirdo cultists who got into internecine fights, disagreed about what their beloved teacher even said, some even likely trying to enrich themselves or run their own grift, etc. To be blunt, it’s not that unusual for cultists to not get on the same page. And then be weird and vague even about their founders.

But that answer is also a reason to leave that faith. Because then you realize that you can’t trust weirdo cultists to even accurately document what was taught, let alone to ascertain if any of it was true.

Hansen thinks more was deliberate, that all of “the brother of Jesus the one called Christ” is fake. I think only “the one called Christ” is fake—and, yes accidental, but Hansen’s argument that it is deliberate requires the whole thing be fake, and not just the three words I (and most who suspect meddling here) think are fake.

Hansen does have an answer to your argument, though. In fact, much of her paper is about refuting an argument like that. So you might want to read the whole thing.

But in summary:

Eusebius, on Origen’s authority, sees two divergent iterations of the passage in [Origen’s] Commentary on Matthew and Contra Celsum and ascribes them to Josephus as separate passages. [And the] latter he makes up using the quotations from Contra Celsum.

In other words, yes, on her theory of the text, Eusebius is faking it deliberately and thus lying (which is not implausible; he’s a well-documented liar), and his motive is to try and fix Origen’s mistake and thus create a plausible attestation to Jesus that doesn’t stray too far from being corroborated by Origen or require too implausible a change to the text (because at that point in time hundreds of other libraries still had the text of the Antiquities, so a change too large to be plausible and too convenient to be believable would be a harder sell—not impossible, but why make your life harder when you don’t have to).

Hansen produces and defends a plausible sequence of events along these lines.

One might challenge her by saying the TF suggests Eusebius would be inclined to doctor the James passage more than we observe (for example, having Josephus blame the destruction of the temple on James and have the people call James the just), and that would be a weak but positive point against her, but IMO, this is nixed by proposing either (1) the TF was not inserted by Eusebius but Pamphilus or (2) Eusebius felt he’d used up all his luck at pulling that off and so was wary of trying it again, and thus kept his mods simple this time. After all, to have two elaborate insertions no one else has in their copy would make this twice as hard a sell, by the reasoning “once can be a mistake (maybe that passage coincidentally was lost from an archetype a century ago), but twice looks like intent.”

In the end, I think (like you do) that an accident is more probable. But Hansen’s theory, though IMO less probable, is still more probable than any theory of authenticity, and so it still functions as a defeater for that.

Here’s an argument that you don’t make, probably because it’s not a very strong argument, but I’m going to mention it anyway.

Whoever edited or fabricated the Testimonium Flavianum at least left it as what he considered a true narrative. Misattributed, sure. But not false.

But if someone deliberately swapped out the original “son of Damneus” (or whatever) for “the one called Christ” (not just correcting what he thought was a previous error), he would knowingly create a false narrative, making the story say something that he knew wasn’t so.

And to what purpose? He wouldn’t be glorifying his own Jesus, who has been out of the picture for thirty years when the story opens. He wouldn’t be scoring any doctrinal points or refuting any heresies. At most, he would be adding yet another story about nasty Jews persecuting Christians, and being reversed by Romans. But Ananus already looks pretty nasty even in the original text.

Even someone unprincipled enough to create a forgery for the greater glory of God might think twice about creating a pointless falsehood with no benefit.

I once abandoned Christianity and became an atheist because I couldn’t answer the question of how 1) the 12 apostles, seeing God, didn’t create one book. As if they weren’t interested in it; 2) why Paul is silent about the real Jesus. As if he didn’t exist; 3) why the devil randomly inserts his texts everywhere. It all seems like a total lie. I can’t explain it logically. And if I see madness, I can’t stand it.

Thank you for pointing that out!

Fixed.

So while that is absolutely fair to point out, it’s not always the best approach to go in when starting to examine a belief system, at least anthropologically.

When you’re engaging with a worldview, especially one that’s not in your cultural-historical context, a lot of it can seem baffling or incoherent. But that’s often because they have base assumptions that go unstated. In religion, those base assumptions are very often of the language of mythology, loyalty and emotion. It “feels” as if blood is important to us, so it must be cosmically significant; ergo, a blood sacrifice just has power.

That doesn’t mean you won’t detect contradictions that are irresolvable, or that you have reason to suspect they didn’t detect. But you have to actually do the investigation first.

So in this case, for example, while Paul may not have squared this circle himself, one could quite easily point out that the fact that the Romans themselves in their state religion worshiped demonic mimickers of the true power of God is distinct from the underlying health of the state. Would Rome collapse if they changed their gods? No.

Moreover, what isn’t “established by God?” If you accept omnipotence and omniscience, God even “established” the devil. (This, of course, gives no greater legitimacy to anything more than anything else, but, again, the consistency here isn’t totally intellectual or logical).

Most centrally, I don’t think Paul is totally sincere. I think he knows damn well that they need to toe the line, even internally, to avoid the sin of rebellion.

Yes, there is a broad issue inherent in the Christian worldview, that views this world as corrupted by devils but also with its political institutions having some legitimacy. Notice, though, how this allowed Christianity to adapt when it gained power itself.

Indeed, this is a big problem across the board. All the church fathers were lazy with quotation, even of their own Bible.