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M*W: This has been discussed plenty of times on this forum. It has undoubtedly been found to be a forgery.
- Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3 §63
(Based on the translation of Louis H. Feldman, The Loeb Classical Library.)
"About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared."
References:
1.
H. St. J. Thackeray, J
osephus: The Man and the Historian (New York: Jewish Institute of Religion/Ktav, 1929).
2.
Louis H. Feldman,
Josephus and Modern Scholarship, (New York: de Gruyter, 1984)
3.
John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 56-88.
4.
Robert Eisler,
The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus' Recently Discovered "Capture of Jerusalem" and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources, trans. Alexander Haggerty Krappe (Methuen, 1931)
5.
Paul Winter, "
Josephus on Jesus and James" in
E. Schurer,
The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. and ed. by G. Vermes and F. Millar (Edinburgh: Clark, 1973), pp. 428-441
6.
J. Neville Birdsall, "
The Continuing Enigma of Josephus' Testimony about Jesus," BJRL 67 (1984)
7.
Ch. Martin, "
Le Testimonium Flavianum. Vers une solution definitive?" Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire 20 (1941), pp. 409-46
8. Shlomo Pines,
An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and its Implications, (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1971)
9.
L. H. Feldman, "
Josephus", in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1991)
10.
Josephus, the Bible, and History (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds. See pp. 430-435, "A Selective Critical Bibliography of Josephus."
11.
Karl H. Rengstorf,
A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus (4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1973-1983)
12.
Steve Mason,
Josephus and the New Testament (Hendrickson, 1992)
13.
James H. Charlesworth,
Jesus Within Judaism (Doubleday, 1988)
14.
Geza Vermes,
Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1974)
15.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer,
The Gospel of Luke, X-XXIV, The Anchor Bible, Vol. 28a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985)
http://www.josephus.org/testimonium.htm
Marshal Gauvin [1818 - 1978] writes:
"Such is the celebrated reference to Christ in Josephus. A more brazen forgery was never perpetrated. For more than two hundred years, the Christian Fathers who were familiar with the works of Josephus knew nothing of this passage. Had the passage been in the works of Josephus, which they knew, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen an Clement of Alexandria would have been eager to hurl it at their Jewish opponents in their many controversies. But it did not exist. Indeed, Origen, who knew his Josephus well, expressly affirmed that that writer had not acknowledged Christ. This passage first appeared in the writings of the Christian Father Eusebius, the first historian of Christianity, early in the fourth century; and it is believed that he was its author. Eusebius, who not only advocated fraud in the interest of the faith, but who is known to have tampered with passages in the works of Josephus and several other writers, introduces this passage in his "Evangelical Demonstration," (Book III., p.124), in these words: "Certainly the attestations I have already produced concerning our Savior may be sufficient."
The article below offers a lot of peer-reviewed scientific publications. This was much too long to copy and paste.
THE CHRIST-MYTH. Translated from the Third Edition
(revised and enlarged) by
C. Delisle Burns, M.A. T. Fisher
Unwin, London ; 1911.
