Hello brothers and sisters,
Last week we went looking for one missing word in the most argued-over paragraph in Josephus, and we found the key to it in the Septuagint’s long history of χριστός. If you missed that one, you can get caught up HERE.
This week we stay in the same paragraph. We just move up a line.
Josephus says Jesus was παραδόξων ἔργων ποιητής (paradoxōn ergōn poiētēs). Last week I rendered it “a doer of startling deeds.” Whiston gave us “a doer of wonderful works.” Other translators say “miraculous.” Or “incredible.” Or “surprising.” One scholar even floats “crazy.”
That’s a lot of daylight between “miraculous” and “crazy.”
And this little phrase carries more weight than its size suggests. Ken Olson, the scholar who has argued hardest that the church historian Eusebius forged the entire paragraph, calls it “markedly Eusebian.” T. C. Schmidt, whose book we leaned on last week, calls that argument the forgery case’s “most powerful.”
So what did “startling deeds” sound like to a Jew writing Greek at the end of the first century?
The best place to find out is the Greek Bible Josephus himself drew on when he wrote his Antiquities. The Septuagint reaches for this word family fourteen times. Every time it’s a verb, God is the one doing it. When it isn’t a verb, it very often marks the moment nobody saw coming.
Let’s dig in.
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The Word
παράδοξος (paradoxos)
Pronunciation: pah-RAH-dox-os
Strong’s: G3861
Meaning: contrary to expectation; unexpected, incredible, extraordinary, strange
Root: παρά (para, “beside, beyond, against”) plus δόξα (doxa, “opinion, expectation”). Something παράδοξος runs past what anyone thought would happen.
NT frequency: 1 (Luke 5:26)
LXX usage: 14 times across the word family. The verb παραδοξάζω (paradoxazō) 5 times: Exodus 8:22 (8:18 in the Greek), 9:4, 11:7; Deuteronomy 28:59; 2 Maccabees 3:30. The adjective 8 times: Judith 13:13; 2 Maccabees 9:24; 3 Maccabees 6:33; 4 Maccabees 2:14; Wisdom 5:2, 16:17, 19:5; Sirach 43:25. The adverb παραδόξως (paradoxōs) once: 4 Maccabees 4:14.
Distinct from related words: σημεῖον (sēmeion, “sign”) points beyond itself. τέρας (teras, “wonder, portent”) stops you in your tracks. δύναμις (dynamis, “mighty work”) puts power on display. παράδοξος only tells you that something defied expectation. It doesn’t tell you who did it, or whether it was good.
That last line matters more than anything else in this post.
In ordinary Greek, παράδοξος could be a compliment or a raised eyebrow. Plato pairs it with “false” (παράδοξόν τε καὶ ψεῦδος, Statesman 281a). Jesus’s enemies used it too. In the second century the critic Celsus, speaking through a Jewish mouthpiece, granted that Jesus did παράδοξα and put them down to magic (Origen, Against Celsus 1.6). More than a century later Eusebius was still answering people who “admit that Jesus performed incredible deeds, but that he did so with deceptive magic” (Demonstration of the Gospel 3.5, in Schmidt’s translation).
So the word could be a confession. It could also be a concession made through gritted teeth.
No wonder the New Testament mostly avoids it. When the apostles talk about miracles, they say “signs and wonders and mighty works” (2 Corinthians 12:12; Acts 2:22). The word Josephus chose shows up in the New Testament exactly once, on the lips of a crowd in Luke 5.
Hold on to that crowd. We’ll come back to them.
When God Makes a Difference
Start in Egypt, at the third plague.
Aaron strikes the dust, and gnats swarm over the land. Up to now Pharaoh’s magicians have kept pace with Moses: staffs into serpents, water into blood, frogs out of the river (Exodus 7:11-12, 22; 8:7).
Not this time.
But the magicians also made to bring out the gnats likewise by their use of drugs, potions, and spells, and yet they were unable. And the gnats were on the people and on the four-footed animals. So the magicians said to the Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” (Exodus 8:18-19, LES)
The line between a trick and a wonder gets drawn right there. And the tricksters are the ones who draw it.
In the very next plague, the flies, the Greek Bible uses παραδοξάζω for the first time:
And in that day I will set apart the land of Goshen, in which My people dwell, that no swarms of flies shall be there, in order that you may know that I am the LORD in the midst of the land. (Exodus 8:22, NKJV)
I will distinguish the land of Goshen in that day, upon where my people are upon it, upon which the dog-flies will not be there, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the lord of all the earth. (Exodus 8:22, LES)
The NKJV says “I will set apart.” The LES says “I will distinguish.” But the Greek verb underneath is παραδοξάσω (paradoxasō). I will make it extraordinary. I will make a marvel of it.
The Hebrew verb is וְהִפְלֵיתִי (vehifleti), from פָּלָה (palah): to set apart, to make distinct. And here’s what stopped me. Palah appears exactly seven times in the Hebrew Bible, four times in Exodus and three in the Psalms. Not once does the Septuagint translate it with a plain word for “separate.” Every single time, it reaches for wonder or glory:
Exodus 8:22 (8:18 in the Greek), 9:4, 11:7: παραδοξάζω, “make extraordinary”
Exodus 33:16: ἐνδοξασθήσομαι, “I will be glorified” (where the NKJV has Moses say “we shall be separate, Your people and I”)
Psalm 4:3 (4:4), 17:7 (16:7), 139:14 (138:14): θαυμαστόω, “make wonderful”
Why would they do that? Because palah has a near twin. פָּלָא (pala’) means “to be wonderful, extraordinary.” The two roots differ only in their last letter, and the Hebrew writers themselves let them brush against each other. Listen to David:
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. (Psalm 139:14, NKJV)
“Wonderfully made” is נִפְלֵיתִי (nifleti), from palah. “Marvelous” is נִפְלָאִים (nifla’im), from pala’. He sets them side by side, and you can hear the rhyme even in transliteration.
So which is it? Did God set Israel apart, or did He make a wonder of them?
I don’t think the translators were confused, and I don’t think the two traditions are competing. They’re describing the same event from opposite sides of the line. The Hebrew tells you what God did. He drew a border between Goshen and the rest of Egypt, between Israel’s cattle and Pharaoh’s, between the Hebrew firstborn and the Egyptian. The Greek tells you what that looked like to everyone watching. Nobody in Egypt saw the flies stop at the edge of Goshen and thought, “What a tidy distinction.” They thought, “That’s impossible.”
The separation was the wonder.
You can see both sides in a single verse. Here is the Hebrew side of Exodus 11:7: “that you may know that the LORD does make a difference between the Egyptians and Israel” (NKJV). And here is the Greek: “in order that you may know the extent to which the Lord will distinguish between the Egyptians and Israel” (LES).
Behind “the extent to which” sits ὅσα παραδοξάσει (hosa paradoxasei), literally “how many marvels He will make.” Even the LES translators feel both pulls. In Exodus they render παραδοξάζω “distinguish,” with the Hebrew. In Deuteronomy they render it “make extraordinary.”
And Deuteronomy is where the word turns dark. Moses warns Israel that if they will not listen, “the Lord shall make extraordinary your plagues and the plagues of your seed” (Deuteronomy 28:59, LES). This time the Hebrew really is pala’: וְהִפְלָא (vehifla’). The God who made Israel a marvel by sparing them can make a marvel of their judgment just as easily.
The word has no moral compass of its own. The Holy One does.
One more thing before we leave Exodus 8:22. Look at how the verse ends. In the Hebrew, God acts “that you may know that I am the LORD in the midst of the land.” In the Greek, it’s “so that you may know that I am the Lord, the lord of all the earth” (κύριος ὁ κύριος πάσης τῆς γῆς, LES). Both are true, and you need both. He is near enough to stand in the middle of Egypt. He is great enough to own all of it.
Now here’s the part that matters for Josephus. When he retells the plagues in his Antiquities, he uses our word. But he gives it to Pharaoh. Pharaoh orders his priests to show him “the same wonderful sights” (Whiston), sneering that Moses isn’t the only one skilled in that sort of learning, and that a man who credits the παράδοξον to God will only fool the uneducated (Antiquities 2.285). Moses answers that his works appear not “by sorcery and deception” (κατὰ γοητείαν καὶ πλάνην) but “by the providence and power of God” (2.286, Whiston).
Josephus knew perfectly well that παράδοξον could be a magician’s word. He put it in Pharaoh’s mouth himself.
The Rescue Nobody Saw Coming
After Deuteronomy, the word vanishes. Not once in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, the Psalms or the Prophets.
When it comes back, it’s in the writings Greek-speaking Jews produced and treasured in the last centuries before Christ: Judith, the books of Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach. These are respected Second Temple Jewish writings, carried in the Septuagint, and they show us how the generations just before Jesus talked about God. And by now the word has found a new job.
It names the rescue nobody expected.
Judith slips out of the Assyrian camp at night with the head of Holofernes in a bag. When she calls up to the gates of Bethulia, the whole town comes running, “because it was incredible to them for her to return” (Judith 13:13, LES). The Greek is ὅτι παράδοξον ἦν αὐτοῖς (hoti paradoxon ēn autois). They had already counted her among the dead.
In 3 Maccabees, the Jews of Egypt are herded into a hippodrome to be trampled by drunken war elephants. The elephants turn instead on the king’s own army. The Jews break into “an ancestral song praising God, the deliverer of Israel and worker of wonders” (3 Maccabees 6:32, LES), and even the king gives thanks to heaven “for the unexpected deliverance” (6:33, LES). παραδόξῳ ... σωτηρίᾳ (paradoxō ... sōtēria). The unexpected salvation.
Then there’s a story told twice. In 2 Maccabees 3, a royal official named Heliodorus marches into the Temple treasury to seize the deposits kept there. A terrifying rider on a horse charges him down, two young men flog him senseless, and the people bless “the Lord, the one who treated his place with distinction” (2 Maccabees 3:30, LES). That’s our Exodus verb again: τὸν παραδοξάζοντα τὸν ἑαυτοῦ τόπον, “the One who made His own place extraordinary.” God sets His house apart the way He once set Goshen apart.
4 Maccabees tells the same episode with the governor Apollonius in the lead role. Angels on horseback, weapons flashing; Apollonius falls half dead in the Temple court and begs the Hebrews to pray for him. The high priest Onias does, and “the one who was preserved quite unexpectedly went to report to the king what happened to him” (4 Maccabees 4:14, LES). παραδόξως διασωθείς (paradoxōs diasōtheis).
Same event, two angles. In 2 Maccabees the marvel is God’s defense of His house. In 4 Maccabees the marvel is God’s mercy to the man who came to rob it.
And when the Wisdom of Solomon looks back at the Exodus, it reaches for the same word the Exodus translators did. The seventh plague brought fire mingled with hail (Exodus 9:24), and Wisdom marvels: “For what is most unexpected, in the water, which quenches all things, the fire burned even more” (Wisdom 16:17, LES). At the Red Sea, God acted “so that your people might experience an unusual journey, but those people might find a strange death” (Wisdom 19:5, LES). A παράδοξος road for Israel. A strange death for Egypt. One sea, two outcomes, and the difference is God’s.
Not every use is so lofty. In 2 Maccabees 9:24 a dying Antiochus Epiphanes names a successor in case “anything unexpected should happen” (LES). It did. He died a few verses later (9:28). In 4 Maccabees 2:14 the writer tells his readers not to think it “surprising” that reason can master even hatred.
Same word, nothing miraculous about it.
And that’s exactly the point. The word didn’t change from book to book. What changed was who was doing the startling.
Wonderful and Startling Works
There’s one place where the Septuagint comes closest to Josephus’s actual phrase, adjective and noun together. It’s in Sirach’s great hymn to the Creator, as the sage looks out at the sea:
Those who sail the sea declare its danger, and we marvel at the reports of our ears. And the incredible and wondrous works are there, a variety of all living things, a creation of sea monsters. (Sirach 43:24-25, LES)
“The incredible and wondrous works” is τὰ παράδοξα καὶ θαυμάσια ἔργα (ta paradoxa kai thaumasia erga). Two verses later Sirach gives up trying to describe it all: “the end of words is ‘He is everything’” (43:27, LES).
Now watch what Josephus does with the same pair of words.
When he tells of the death of Elisha, he writes, “He also performed wonderful and surprising works by prophecy, and such as were gloriously preserved in memory by the Hebrews” (Antiquities 9.182, Whiston). The Greek is θαυμαστὰ γὰρ καὶ παράδοξα ... ἔργα. “Wonderful” and “startling,” with “works.” The same pairing Sirach uses for the sea monsters, in reverse order.
This is Elisha. The prophet who raised a dead boy (2 Kings 4:32-35), whose very bones brought a dead man back to life (2 Kings 13:21), and whom Josephus describes, in the same breath, as “a man celebrated for righteousness, and in eminent favor with God.” When Josephus wants to describe what a true prophet of God did, “startling works” is the language he reaches for.
Two more uses come from a story I gave a whole book to, The Letter of Aristeas. Book 12 of the Antiquities retells that letter, the story of how the Law was first translated into Greek.
When Ptolemy designs a golden table as a gift for the Temple in Jerusalem, Josephus says the king was clever at grasping the nature of all kinds of things and at conceiving “new and startling works” (ἔργων καινῶν καὶ παραδόξων, Antiquities 12.63). A few paragraphs later the king clears his court to receive the elders from Jerusalem at once, “doing this unusual thing and contrary to custom” (παράδοξον τοῦτο ποιῶν καὶ παρὰ τὸ ἔθος, 12.87).
Keep that last one in mind. It’s about to become a witness for the prosecution.
Josephus or Eusebius?
Ken Olson has argued for years that Eusebius wrote the whole paragraph. He made the case in an early paper written as a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland, and again in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1999). On our phrase, he doesn’t hedge:
The term PARADOXWN ERGWN POIHTHS is markedly Eusebian. POIHTHS never occurs in Josephus in the sense of “maker” rather than “poet,” and the only time Josephus combines forms of PARADOXOS and POIHW it is in the sense of “acting contrary to custom” (A.J. 12.87) rather than “making miracles.”
(Olson types his Greek in Latin letters. PARADOXWN ERGWN POIHTHS is our παραδόξων ἔργων ποιητής.)
There’s the witness for the prosecution: Ptolemy’s “unusual thing” in Antiquities 12.87. Olson adds that Eusebius, by contrast, combines these words constantly and seems to reserve the full set for Jesus. And he gives Eusebius a motive. Critics, pagan and Jewish, called Jesus a γόης (goēs), a wizard, a charlatan. Eusebius spent whole chapters answering that charge, and Olson argues the paragraph in Josephus answers it a little too perfectly. His paper ends with a flat verdict: “There is nothing in the language or content of the Testimonium, as it appears in the Demonstratio Evangelica, that suggests it is anything other than a completely Eusebian composition.”
That’s a serious argument from a serious scholar, and Schmidt treats it that way. He calls it the forgery case’s most powerful argument. Then he answers it on three fronts.
First, Josephus does talk this way. He uses παράδοξα with ἔργα for Elisha (9.182) and for Ptolemy (12.63), as we just saw. He never uses ποιητής for a “doer,” true. But he does use its cousin ποίησις (poiēsis), “a doing, a deed,” with a genitive the way our paragraph does, and seven of the eight times he does it fall in Antiquities 17 to 19, the very neighborhood of our paragraph. The great Josephus scholar Thackeray noticed long ago that Book 18 has a taste for odd words and roundabout phrasing.
Second, look at when Eusebius uses the phrase. Schmidt ran a search across the whole surviving body of Greek literature. Outside his quotations of Josephus, Eusebius uses the phrase nine times. The first comes in his Church History a few chapters before he quotes the paragraph. Four more cluster tightly around his quotation of it in the Demonstration of the Gospel. Only twenty years and more later, in works from the 330s, does he use it on his own. To Schmidt, that pattern looks like a man who read a striking phrase in Josephus, quoted it again and again, and eventually absorbed it. Not a man who planted it.
Part of the disagreement turns on which of Eusebius’s books came first. Olson’s paper takes the Demonstration as the earlier work. Schmidt dates the first edition of the Church History before it.
Third, the word is a liability. Remember the critics who “admit that Jesus performed incredible deeds, but that he did so with deceptive magic.” That’s Eusebius describing his opponents. He knew παράδοξα was the word Jesus’s enemies were happy to concede. Josephus knew it too; he put it in Pharaoh’s mouth. So why would a forger working to clear Jesus of sorcery pick the very word sorcery’s accusers used? Eusebius can use the phrase warmly elsewhere because he surrounds it with praise. In Josephus’s paragraph it stands on its own, and on its own it cuts both ways.
What about Correa? He lists this phrase among the style arguments he thinks can’t settle anything by themselves. And here the old translations split. Jerome’s Latin and Michael’s Syriac both keep Jesus as a worker of wonders. Agapius’s Arabic doesn’t; his Jesus is simply a good man known for his virtue, with no wonders mentioned at all. But Agapius is summarizing, nine centuries after Josephus, and Correa himself warns that his abridgments are free.
So where does that leave us? I think Schmidt has the better of this one. A Christian inventing praise for Jesus had better words close at hand, and the New Testament shows us which ones. “Signs and wonders and mighty works” would have done the job without handing the opposition a weapon. A first-century Jewish historian describing a teacher he admired but didn’t follow, on the other hand, would reach for exactly this kind of word. Impressive. Undeniable. And noncommittal about where the power came from.
We Have Seen Strange Things Today
Now, back to that crowd in Luke 5.
Jesus is teaching in a house so packed that nobody else can get in. Pharisees and teachers of the law have come from every village of Galilee and Judea, and from Jerusalem (Luke 5:17). A paralyzed man’s friends can’t reach the door, so they climb onto the roof, pull up the tiles, and lower him down on his mat right in front of Jesus (5:19). Jesus looks at him and says his sins are forgiven.
The room goes cold. The scribes and Pharisees start reasoning among themselves: “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (5:21, NKJV).
So Jesus gives them something they can see. He tells the man to get up, take his mat, and go home, so they will know “that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins” (5:24). And the man does. He walks out “glorifying God” (5:25). Then:
And they were all amazed, and they glorified God and were filled with fear, saying, “We have seen strange things today!” (Luke 5:26, NKJV)
“Strange things” is παράδοξα (paradoxa). The only time the New Testament uses the word.
Look at what surrounds it in the Greek. The man goes home δοξάζων τὸν θεόν (doxazōn ton theon), “glorifying God.” The crowd ἐδόξαζον τὸν θεόν (edoxazon ton theon), “glorified God.” And then they say παράδοξα. In the Bible’s Greek, δόξα almost always means glory. In παράδοξος it keeps its older sense, expectation. Whether Luke meant the echo or not, it’s there on the page: they gave God glory for something beyond every expectation.
Schmidt suggests the crowd’s word “may not have been an entirely positive” one. I see why. Fear is in the verse too. But Luke puts the glorifying first, and twice. This is what real wonder sounds like. Amazement, fear, and praise, all in one breath.
And here’s where the Septuagint hands us one last surprise.
In the Wisdom of Solomon, the ungodly plot against “the righteous one” who calls himself a “child of the Lord” (Wisdom 2:13) and boasts that God is his father (2:16). “If the righteous one is God’s son,” they sneer, God will rescue him (2:18). So they condemn him to a shameful death (2:20). Augustine said that in this book Christ’s passion is “most openly prophesied” (City of God 17.20).
Some of you will want to know how much weight I put on that. Fair question. I don’t take books like Wisdom whole or leave them whole. I weigh them a portion at a time, and a portion carries authority for me when nothing in it contradicts Scripture, established history, or known science. So I don’t have to settle every line of Wisdom to settle this one.
And this portion passes easily. Nothing in Wisdom 2 or 5 cuts against anything in Scripture. It stands right beside Psalm 22 and beside Isaiah’s suffering servant, the παῖς (pais) whose exaltation makes nations marvel and kings shut their mouths (Isaiah 52:13-15). Wisdom’s righteous man calls himself the same thing, παῖδα κυρίου (paida kyriou), a “child of the Lord.” And Matthew seems to hear this chapter at the cross. The mockers say of Jesus:
“He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He will have Him; for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” (Matthew 27:43, NKJV)
The first half is Psalm 22:8. The second half sounds a great deal like Wisdom 2:18.
So here’s where I land. I hold this passage as authoritative. In its own setting it pictured a righteous man mocked by people who had walked away from God’s law (Wisdom 2:12). That’s the floor. Its fullest meaning, the ceiling, was waiting at Golgotha. Augustine wasn’t overreaching.
Three chapters later, the ungodly see that same righteous man standing in great confidence before them:
When they see it, they will be stirred up with terrible fear and be amazed at the unexpected salvation. (Wisdom 5:2, LES)
Fear. Amazement. And παράδοξος: ἐκστήσονται ἐπὶ τῷ παραδόξῳ τῆς σωτηρίας. Luke’s word for amazement, ἔκστασις (ekstasis), comes from that same verb. The three notes Luke strikes in that crowded house are sounded together here, in a book written well before his Gospel. And then the scoffers say this:
“This was he whom we once held in derision, and in a proverb of disgrace; we fools considered his life madness and his death dishonored. How was he counted among the sons of God, and his share is among the saints?” (Wisdom 5:3-5, LES)
In Greek it opens οὗτος ἦν (houtos ēn). “This was he.” The same two words at the center of last week’s post: ὁ χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν.
So here is what this word has been teaching us all along. παράδοξος never tells you what to make of the surprise. Pharaoh called it a trick. His own magicians called it the finger of God. Josephus wrote it down and kept walking. The crowd in that house glorified God. And Wisdom says a day is coming when the people who mocked the Righteous One will look at Him and say, at last, “This was he,” stunned by a salvation they never saw coming.
The startling deeds were never really in dispute. Celsus conceded them. Eusebius’s opponents conceded them. If Schmidt is right, Josephus conceded them too. The question was always the one the scribes asked in Luke 5: Τίς ἐστιν οὗτος; “Who is this?”
The man carrying his mat home was the answer. And the real παράδοξον wasn’t that he could walk. It was that his sins were gone.
Next week we’ll close out this short series by stepping back from the words to the method.
Two scholars, two very different toolkits, one paragraph.
How do you weigh evidence like this?
And why doesn’t my both/and conviction about the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures carry over to Josephus?
Questions for Reflection
Pharaoh’s magicians kept pace with Moses until they couldn’t, and then they were the ones who said “This is the finger of God.” Where has God done something in your life that no explanation but His could cover?
In the Hebrew, God “sets apart” His people. In the Greek, He “makes a marvel” of them. In what ways is your church meant to look like a wonder to the people watching it?
Judith’s town had stopped expecting her to come back, and the Jews in 3 Maccabees had stopped expecting to live. Is there something you’ve quietly stopped expecting God to do?
The crowd in Luke 5 was amazed, afraid and full of praise all at once. The last time you saw God at work, which of those came easiest to you, and which was missing?
Dig Deeper
Every use of the παράδοξος word family in the Septuagint, plus every use of the Hebrew verb palah. References follow English numbering, with the Septuagint’s numbering in parentheses where it differs.
The verb παραδοξάζω, always with God as subject: Exodus 8:22 (8:18), 9:4, 11:7; Deuteronomy 28:59; 2 Maccabees 3:30
The adjective παράδοξος: Judith 13:13; 2 Maccabees 9:24; 3 Maccabees 6:33; 4 Maccabees 2:14; Wisdom 5:2, 16:17, 19:5; Sirach 43:25
The adverb παραδόξως: 4 Maccabees 4:14
Every use of palah in the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 8:22 (8:18), 9:4, 11:7, 33:16; Psalm 4:3 (4:4), 17:7 (16:7), 139:14 (138:14)
The New Testament’s only use: Luke 5:26
The righteous one in Wisdom: Wisdom 2:12-20; 5:1-8
Josephus: Antiquities 2.285-286 (Pharaoh and the magicians); 9.182 (Elisha); 12.63, 12.87 (Ptolemy, in the retelling of the Letter of Aristeas); 18.63 (the Testimonium)
Sources
T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, May 5, 2025), doi.org/10.1093/9780191957697.001.0001. Free to download. Pages drawn on here: 73-76, 127-128, 225-227.
Kenneth A. Olson, “Eusebian Fabrications: The Testimonium Flavianum” (paper, Department of History, University of Maryland, undated). His argument in published form: “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 305-322; and “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum”, in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations, ed. Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013).
Jesús Fernández-Pedrera Correa, “The Testimonium Flavianum in Four Transmission Lines: Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac,” Zenodo preprint, August 15, 2026, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21945637, pp. 5, 7. Not yet peer reviewed.
Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.285-286; 9.182; 12.63; 12.87. Greek text: Benedikt Niese’s edition, via the Perseus Digital Library. English quotations marked Whiston are from William Whiston’s 1737 translation (public domain); the rest are my own.
Augustine, City of God 17.20. Origen, Against Celsus 1.6, Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel 3.5, and Plato, Statesman 281a, as cited and translated in Schmidt.
Septuagint quotations marked LES are from Rick Brannan, Ken M. Penner, Michael Aubrey, Israel Loken, and Isaiah Hoogendyk, The Lexham English Septuagint, Second Edition (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020). Scripture marked NKJV is taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Greek Old Testament: Rahlfs-Hanhart. Greek New Testament: SBL Greek New Testament. Hebrew: Westminster Leningrad Codex.
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