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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Tom Schmidt
My name is Tom Schmidt, and I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University.
David Capes
Dr Tom Schmidt, Tom, good to see you. Welcome to your first appearance on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Tom Schmidt
It’s great to be here, David.
David Capes
Thanks so much. You’re going to be at Princeton University next year in the James Madison Program, but you just got tenure where you are. That’s fantastic. Congratulations.
Tom Schmidt
Thank you. I found out yesterday.
David Capes
Oh, that’s great. That’ll lift your spirits, won’t it? It’s a hard road, but it’s a great road for those who are brave enough to go down it. For those who don’t know Tom Schmidt, tell us, who is he?
Tom Schmidt
I guess I’ll start by saying I’m a Christian. I was raised in a Christian family. I didn’t embrace my faith till I was 18. I came to college spiritually alone, lost, and I had this encounter with Jesus. It was like darkness to light for me, death to life. And I started reading the New Testament. I loved it. I couldn’t get enough of it.
I wanted to read it in its original language. I started taking Greek and Latin. Then I realized I was majoring in Latin and Greek. So, I ended up majoring in the languages. I taught Latin and Greek in the local schools where I graduated. I eventually found my way to Yale University. I did my doctoral studies there in ancient Christianity. I focused on Christianity in Asia and Africa, before European colonization, and the spread of Christianity there. But I also focused on the New Testament. I publish on the formation of the New Testament. And I also have expertise in the field of historical Jesus studies.
David Capes
Do you consider yourself as a historian or theologian, or a little bit of both?
Tom Schmidt
More of a historian.
David Capes
Okay, so you’re really interested in understanding the history of early Christianity and its spread. First of all, to Africa and Asia. We think so much about what happens with Paul going toward Rome and going toward the west. We don’t know the significance of what happened in Africa and to the east of Jerusalem and Syria.
Tom Schmidt
Yes, precisely. I tell my students that Christianity spread east and south just as quickly and as successfully, even more so, than it spread to the west. In Rome, there are a lot of remarkable things going on.
David Capes
It’s a story that we don’t know much about. Now today we’re here to talk about a remarkable book that you have just finished and is being published by Oxford University Press. It’s going to come out first in the UK and then later in the United States. The title is “Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ.” You have a website, josephusandjesus.com that we want to direct people to, where they can find more about you and the book and various projects. Now, “new evidence”. I’m fascinated by that. I think a lot of people will be, especially for those who aren’t sure about Josephus. Okay, I know
Jesus, but who is Josephus?
Tom Schmidt
Josephus was born in first century Jerusalem. He was a Jewish priest who then turned into a Jewish general in the war with Rome, who then turned into a Jewish historian. He had three occupations, and he is why we know most of what we know about early first century Judea and Jewish practices. He wrote almost half a million words. His magnum opus is this book called the Antiquities of the Jews. He wrote it around 93 AD and in it, he talks about all of Jewish history, pretty much up to his present day.
And when he discusses the reign of Pontius Pilate, the governorship of Pontius Pilate in book 18, he has a very famous paragraph about Jesus that is, if authentic, the first discussion about Jesus given by a non-Christian that we have on the historical record. We’ll talk about the controversy over that in a bit. It’s quite famous. Scholars will give it the name, “the testimony of Flavianum”, which is a fancy Latin name for just the testimony of Flavius Josephus. If you hear the TF, “the testimony of Flavianum”, it’s referring to this paragraph-length account of Jesus written by Josephus around 93 AD.
David Capes
He’s not a Christian. Would you say he’s antagonistic to Christians, or would you say he’s this “whatever will be, will be” kind of guy. What is his disposition?
Tom Schmidt
That’s a good question. I think he is not antagonistic overly though he may be a little suspicious. Because he might not like them all that much, but he certainly doesn’t seem to have a lot of animosity towards them. Potentially, he could have some curiosity. It’s a little difficult to know, but he certainly is not a Christian, and he’s certainly not openly hostile. He’s somewhere in between.
David Capes
Being a Jewish general at that time, he was on the losing side. But at the same time, he figured out a way to curry favor with the Romans and, to some degree, assist them. Some have called him a bit of a traitor. He switched sides. Is that a fair assessment?
Tom Schmidt
It’s fair to say he switched sides. I think he’d cast himself a bit like Jeremiah, where Jeremiah is saying look, the Babylonians are coming, and you better get used to it. And I think he had the same attitude towards the Romans, that he felt like this was God’s will. He was enormously well-connected. He met the Empress when he was younger. He became friends with two future emperors. He knew the last King of the Jews, Herod Agrippa, II. He was friends with him. He knew high priests. He knew the head of the Sanhedrin. You’re talking about a man of enormous connections in the Jewish world and the Roman world, and he settled in Rome around 75 AD after the Jewish war. And he devoted the last years of his life to writing.
David Capes
I’m looking at these green volumes that are on my shelf here that are published by the Harvard Classic series. And it’s a great series, but there are a ton of books, as you said. Did you say half a million words by him?
Tom Schmidt
Yes, almost half a million words in a language not his own. Greek was not his first language.
David Capes
I wonder if he had a good editor like you and I. We both need good editors.
Tom Schmidt
I think actually, he had a team of secretaries. I think he had some royal patronage and things like that.
David Capes
Well, it helps to start off being well-connected and knowing all of these people, because that would put you at a certain level and a certain advantage. In this testimony of Flavius Josephus that you talked about, there is a brief paragraph that deals with Jesus of Nazareth. What does it say exactly? Let’s just get it on the table. First, what does it say? And second, why is there a question of authenticity?
Tom Schmidt
Those are two very interrelated questions. How the passage is typically translated and interpreted by scholars, is as an introduction to Jesus. But Josephus says all of these wildly positive pro-Christian things about Jesus. He says he worked miracles, He says he was the Christ. He says he was raised from the dead. He says he fulfilled Hebrew prophecy. Scholars have looked at that, and they’ve said, Josephus was not a Christian. He was Jewish. And we have early evidence from other early sources saying explicitly he was not a Christian.
So how can he say Jesus is the Christ? How can he say that he was raised from the dead? The running theory, the majority position by scholars for about the past 100 years has been that Josephus wrote something about Jesus in his antiquities, but a later Christian scribe didn’t really like it and changed it and altered it. And that alteration, that contaminated version, spread throughout the later manuscripts. Now today, when we gather all the manuscripts that we have of his book they’ve all been contaminated. The net result is that we cannot use Josephus as a witness to Jesus or to learn about Jesus, because we don’t really have his words.
That’s been the running theory on that. And actually, that’s what I used to believe when I started writing this book. I also thought that was a very good argument.
