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>About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder; and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis in Rome...” (emphasis added)
>Since Jospehus had said elsewhere that the Roman Emperor Vespasian was the one prophesized in Jewish Messianic lore, he could not possibly have believed that Jesus was the Christ. One theory, popularized by Biblical scholar Geza Vermes, is that the original text instead used the phrase “He was called the Christ”, which correlates with a later Antiquities 2.23.20 passage from two books later about James, “brother of Jesus, that is called the Christ”. However, these are the only two instances in both of his historical works in which he uses the title Christ. Every other time Josephus refers to a Jewish term unfamiliar his Roman audience, he provides a long explanation of what the term means, but in this case, he appears to assume that his readers are familiar with the term Christ
>This historical verification of Jesus living in the first century CE is accepted by a majority of Biblical scholars today, but during the 1800s, scholars were nearly unanimous in identifying the passage as a falsely attributed interpolation of the original text. In 1874, the Anglican priest Sabine Baring-Gould wrote:
>“That this passage is spurious has been almost universally acknowledged. One may be, perhaps, accused of killing dead birds, if one again examines and discredits the passage... It has been suggested that Josephus may have written about Christ as in the passage quoted, but that the portions within brackets are the interpolations of a Christian copyist. But when these portions within brackets are removed, the passage loses all its interest and is a dry statement utterly unlike the sort of notice Josephus would have been likely to insert
