Again, I won't litigate the arguments of the authors. I was on the same side of historical "fact" as you before reading the books I mentioned. They do a good jo

Again, I won't litigate the arguments of the authors. I was on the same side of historical "fact" as you before reading the books I mentioned. They do a good job of explaining their cases. One that I'll mention so that this isn't an empty rebuttal: Remove the verse about Jesus from Josephus's "Antiquities of the Jews" and the narrative about Pilate makes much more sense. Seems like a later revision. Still, beyond that, there appear to be revisions within the revision. Rad verse 2 and 4 without the verse about Jesus at 3 and it's better flow. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Antiquities_of_the_Jews/Book_XVIII#Chapter_3 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Antiquities_of_the_Jews/B... I'd have to crack "On the Historicity of Jesus," to cite the lines that the author believes were added there, but they included the bit about him being called Christ and some other section. The argument was sound, in my opinion. And it wasn't mentioned in the writings of whatever apologetic a century later when it would have been to their advantage (Origen? Again, I'd have to crack the book.) And not mentioned by Philo, despite his writing about the cruelty of Pilate. This is all quite weak coming from me and I'm sure there are good arguments against how I've presented this. But the authors do a commendable job of presenting their arguments and evidence. Final thought: anything that disputed this stance either had to be reinterpreted (Paul and contemporary epistles) to mean something other than what they said or the works were destroyed as heretical. The Qumran caves gave us evidence of this with a handful of works that only remained in existence there (so far as we know). Apologists reference many other heretical works that no longer exist and we'd not know they'd been written had they not been decried. Once again, posting without proofreading as I have an after-work obligation and I'm only home for a short time in between.