Calypsis4 writes:
Josephus the historian testifies of Jesus existence ...
No, what Josephus can most reliably attest to is the existence of a group of people who called themselves Christians and that they believed Jesus to have been resurrected. The relevant passage, the
Testimonium Flavianum, reads as follows:
quote:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man [if indeed one ought to call him a man.] For he was one who wrought surprising feats 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 Christ.] When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. [On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him.] And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
The bracketed sections are parts that many scholars (e.g. Yamauchi and Meier, from whom this is indirectly taken) believe to be later interpolations by Christians trying to crank up the volume, so to speak. I agree that it seems unlikely for a Jew like Josephus to refer to someone as the Messiah and yet not make a bigger deal of it.
(By the way, I took this selection from the
CARM website, hardly an atheist source.)
Anyway, the point is that one has to distinguish between primary testimony and secondary testimony. Josephus isn't attesting to what he knows firsthand; he's testifying about what other people believe. Likewise, some Christians claim 500 eyewitness accounts of the resurrected Jesus. They are mistaken. What they have is one person saying that there are 500 witnesses. Quite a different thing.