Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison program,

in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University.

I'm your host, Ryan Schenkel.

Okay. University. I'm your host, Ryan Schenkel. This episode is a second part of a two-part series on the Gospel According to Josephus.

Please see our catalog for last week's installment.

Today, as we continue season five, I have with us as our guest, Professor Thomas C. Schmidt.

Professor Schmidt, welcome to Madison's Notes. So Josephus is writing contemporaneous, pretty much as the

gospels being formed, right? And so he would be drawing from an different but adjacent group of eyewitnesses,

according to your interpretation. Now let's specifically

dig into the text a little bit. So you have an initial translation of Jewish antiquities 18.63. Can you read

not the Greek, of course? Although you're welcome to, I welcome extemporaneous readings of ancient

Greek. Feel free to do so, but also please do include the English.

All right, this is from Josephus's antiquities 18.63 to 64, and this is how the passage is typically

translated by scholars. We'll talk about whether we think it's a good translation or not in a moment,

but it goes like this. And in this time, there lived Jesus,

a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of miraculous deeds,

a teacher of men who received truth with pleasure. And he led many from among the Jews,

and many from among the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the

cross at the accusation of the first men among us,

those who had first loved him did not cease to do so, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day,

given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him,

...