Christianity is the largest of the five major world religions, with over two billion followers worldwide. Its origins trace back to Jesus of Nazareth, who lived around 2,000 years ago. While the historical existence of Jesus is widely accepted by scholars, the biblical accounts of his miracles and resurrection remain topics of debate, partly due to the religious nature of the texts.

This raises an interesting question: Are there any historical records about Jesus from non-Christian sources? Surprisingly, there is one—and only one—such reference, found in the works of the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus.

In 93 or 94 AD, Josephus wrote The Antiquities of the Jews, a historical account of the Jewish people. In Book 18, Chapter 3, Section 3, he mentions Jesus:

“At that time there was a man named Jesus, a wise man—if it is right to call him merely a man. He performed amazing deeds and was a teacher of those who receive the truth with joy. He attracted many Jews and also many Gentiles. He was the Christ. Although Pilate, at the instigation of our leaders, sentenced him to crucifixion, his followers remained devoted to him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the prophets of God had foretold, along with countless other marvels about him. And the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not disappeared to this day.”

If authentic, this passage would be a rare, non-Christian historical reference to Jesus, supporting key claims found in the New Testament. However, the authenticity of the TF remains a highly debated topic to this day. The primary reason for this controversy is the fact that the original Jewish Antiquities no longer exist—only later manuscripts survive, raising concerns that these could be forgeries.

One of the main points of skepticism is the overwhelmingly positive tone used to describe Jesus. This is particularly questionable given the historical context: Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah caused significant upheaval within Jewish society, ultimately leading to Christianity’s separation from Judaism. As a Jewish historian, it seems unlikely that Josephus would have written so favorably about Jesus. Additionally, the passage states that Jesus was the Messiah, which, if genuinely written by Josephus, would imply that he had converted to Christianity—something that is not supported by historical evidence. In fact in Contra Celsum (248 AD) Origenes explicitly states that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Messiah, further contradicting the TF’s wording.

Some scholars suspect that Eusebius of Caesarea, a 4th-century church historian, may have altered the TF. Eusebius was the first Christian writer to extensively study and cite Josephus, and later Christian authors often referenced his works rather than Josephus’ original text. Additional discrepancies emerge in a Latin translation by Jerome (392 AD), where the phrase He was the Christ was rendered as: It was believed he was the Christ. This wording suggests a different version of the TF, one that may be closer to what Josephus originally wrote An identical variation is also found in the works of Michael the Syrian.

Current Theories on the Authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum

Scholars today generally fall into one of four camps regarding the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum:

The TF is entirely a Christian forgery: Kenneth Olsen, professor at Duke University, argues that the language and stylistic elements in the TF resemble those of Eusebius rather than Josephus. Paul J. Hopper further supports this claim by showing that the grammatical structures in the TF are more consistent with later Christian writings than with Josephus’ style.

The TF was altered, but an original core remains: Fernando Bermejo-Rubio suggests that while the TF has been edited over time, a pre-existing passage likely served as its foundation. This theory is supported by comparisons between the TF and citations found in later sources, such as Jerome and Michael the Syrian, which indicate possible Christian interpolations added to an earlier text.

The TF is mostly genuine, with minor Christian insertions: John P. Meier takes a more moderate stance, arguing that the TF is largely authentic but contains a few key Christian additions. He identifies three suspect phrases: if it is right to call him merely a man, He was the Christ. and the reference to Jesus’ resurrection. When these are removed, the passage appears more neutral and aligns more plausibly with what a Jewish historian of the time might have written.

The TF is completely authentic: Ulrich Victor takes the strongest pro-authenticity position, asserting that modern scholars misinterpret Josephus’ intent, his audience, and the transmission history of the Jewish Antiquities. According to Victor, these misinterpretations have led to the mistaken belief that the TF was altered, when in fact, it may be entirely genuine.

A New Approach: Computational Authorship Verification

As demonstrated before the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum has long been debated using linguisitc, historic and text-critical methods. However, to this day, no one has applied computational techniques from Data Science and Natural Language Processing to shed new light into this controversy. Although similar problems have been adressed with methods from a branch of research known as Authorship Attribution and Authorship Verification. For example these methods have been used to study the writing style of Shakespeare and compare it to contemporaries in order to verify whether he truly authored the texts attributed to him.

Yet, despite their success in literary analysis, these techniques have never been applied to the Testimonium Flavianum. This is precisely what I aim to do in this blog series. By leveraging computational methods, I hope to uncover new perspectives on this long-standing historical debate.

In the next part of this series, I’ll dive into the Authorship Verification approach, outlining its methodology and discussing some challenges we might face when analyzing Jewish Antiquities.

These blog posts are based on my assignment for the course “Methods and Applications in Digital Humanities” at the University of Leipzig, which is written in german and can be downloaded here

References

• Alice Whealey: The Testimonium Flavianum
• Ken Olson: Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum
• J.P. Meier: A Marginal Jew: The roots of the problem and the person.
• Paul J. Hopper: A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus: Jewish Antiquities xviii:63
• Fernando Bermejo-Rubio: Was the Hypothetical Vorlage of the Testimonium Flavianum a “Neutral” Text? Challenging the Common Wisdom on Antiquitates Judaicae 18.63-64.
• Ulrich Victor: Das Testimonium Flavianum. Ein authentischer Text des Josephus