Truth you can trace
Josephus on the New Testament world
The first-century Jewish historian; our chief non-biblical witness to the period.
- Antiquities of the Jews
Josephus on Jesus: the Testimonium Flavianum
Josephus's brief notice of Jesus as a teacher and wonder-worker condemned under Pilate, the most famous non-Christian reference to Jesus, and the most debated…
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Josephus on John the Baptist
Josephus independently reports John the Baptist, a good man who called the Jews to virtue and to baptism, and his execution by Herod Antipas, who feared his influence over the crowds.
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Josephus on James, the brother of Jesus
Josephus records the high priest Ananus having 'the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James' stoned, an outside-the-Bible notice of both James and, again, his brother.
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Josephus on Pontius Pilate
Josephus describes Pilate's harsh rule, here the deadly suppression of a protest over his use of sacred temple money to build an aqueduct, the kind of episode behind the Gospels' picture of the governor who tried…
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Josephus on the census of Quirinius and Judas the Galilean
Josephus reports the Roman census under Cyrenius (Quirinius) and the tax-revolt it sparked under Judas the Galilean, the same census and the same rebel that Luke and Acts name.
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Josephus on the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes
Josephus describes the three Jewish 'sects' of his day, including the Sadducees' denial that the soul survives death, the very groups and the very dispute that fill the Gospels and Acts.
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Josephus on the death of Herod Agrippa I
Josephus's account of Agrippa I's sudden death at Caesarea, robed in silver, hailed by the crowd as a god, then struck with a fatal pain, closely parallels the scene in Acts.
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Josephus on Herod's rebuilding of the Temple
Josephus describes Herod the Great's vast rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple, the decades-long project John's Gospel points to when the crowd says the temple had been 'forty-six years' in building.
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Read - The Jewish War
Josephus on the destruction of the Temple (AD 70)
An eyewitness of the Roman siege, Josephus describes the burning of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, the catastrophe Jesus foretold when he said not one stone of it would be left upon another.
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9 passages, every one citing its sources. See our sources and licences.
On contested questions we show every major view, attributed and cited, and pick no winner. Answers are synthesized from primary sources, truth you can trace, not opinion.