A Statistical Content Comparison of Josephus's Jesus Account with Early Christian Descriptions of Jesus (original) (raw)

The paraphrase model of the Testimonium Flavianum proposes that the description of Jesus in Jewish Antiquities 18.63-64 is a paraphrase by Josephus of a text very like, if not identical to, Luke 24:19-27. A previous paper demonstrated that the linguistic transformations between the two corresponded to those Josephus is known to have applied to other sources. In this paper, I statistically study the order and content, regardless of vocabulary considerations, of these two texts and a set of other ancient descriptions of Jesus that are of known Christian origin. I quantify the content overlap of pairs of texts, first without regard to their order of presentation, and then include order through the use of sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree algorithms. In both cases, I find that the Luke-Testimonium pair has a correspondence rate higher than all other pairs of texts in the sample, and, especially with the alignment study, find with a high degree of statistical confidence that the correspondences cannot be attributed to the natural similarity of Jesus description among Chrisitan writers or to mere coincidence. I conclude that paraphrase model accounts for this data easily, while previous explanations of Testimonium origins neither explain nor anticipate this result.