FAQ

A: No. Well, yes, the editions we have now say that, but it is, to my mind, a fairly blatant bit of editing and clearly fake.

I still have hopes of an original Josephus manuscript emerging so we could see what he actually wrote, but we have to remember that what we have now comes from copies that survived a thousand years of Catholic rule for much of which it was a capital offence to speak out against the teachings of the Church, and death dealt by the priests was never clean or quick: it seems to be the case that if you base your entire creed on the idea that your god condones - actually, it requires - that a man die under torture, then it goes without saying that causing misery, suffering and unimaginable pain is similarly A Good Thing.

So, yes there is something called the 'Testimonium Flavianum' which is a small section of 'The Antiquities of the Jews' which Josephus is supposed to have written that Christ was the Messiah. A later section names him as the brother of 'James'. The arguments against its authenticity are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus but they do miss out two obvious points.

The first is that this text was not written to hide in dusty libraries to be found in later centuries. It was written to be read aloud as 'entertainment' (you have to read it to know how very desperate they must have been. Suddenly the horrors of the circus becomes so much more understandable). They were read to the court of Vespasian and Titus, to men and women who knew in depth and in detail the more recent events on which both men had risen to fame and power. And key to that was the fact that Jospehus had been a Hebrew general who had escaped crucifixion himself by falling on his face and proclaiming Vespasian to be the inheritor of the star prophecy, which said that the new Messiah would emerge from the east (where Vespasian was conducting the war against the Hebrews) and rule the whole world. Having proclaimed his benefactor the new Messiah, Jospehus would have to be spectacularly stupid to suggest otherwise - and if he had, his manuscripts would almost certainly have been used to light his own funeral pyre.

In addition, he says that Christ's death was the cause of the uprising in 66AD that led to the siege and fall of Jerusalem in 70AD. Which would mean, even at conservative estimates of the supposed crucifixion, there was a 30 year gap between a man's death and the uprising. Far more likely in my view that what he actually wrote was that it was James, the brother of Judas, whose death in 62 AD sparked the riots. That makes sense as a time frame and if Jospehus originally said, 'James, the brother of Judas, who led the insurrection…' it wouldn't have been hard for a copyist to change it.