Flavius Josephus is a fascinating character from history.
We know a lot about Josephus from his own words, most notably two major works:
Antiquities of the Jews
The Wars of the Jews
(these link to title pages, but if you’re interested, just click the “next” icon in the title bar)
If you want to jump to a specific place, here’s a table of contents.
There’s a lot there (almost as many words as you’ll find in the Bible) so I’m not expecting anybody to read all of it (I myself haven’t read all of the writing in both links above)… but if you’re interested and you’ve time on your hands, Josephus is not a bad writer.
For a brief overview I don’t think you can do much better than the following video, though, and I highly recommend it to anybody not familiar with Josephus (I certainly don’t agree with everything Professor Steve Mason says, but he’s always a pleasure to listen to and he knows about as much [or significantly more] about Josephus, I’d wager, as anybody else on Earth):
I say “brief”, but the video is two hours long… the first twenty five minutes, though, would be sufficient for somebody to get enough of an overview to understand my question, below.
Now… to the topic I’d really like to bring to the table to discuss in this OP…
Why doesn’t Josephus say much about Jesus of Nazareth?
Even if I were to allow that the somewhat suspicious Testimonium Flavianum (a short excerpt from his writings that doesn’t seem to fit his style or its immediate textual context) was entirely authentic and in Josephus’ words… well, there’s not a lot about Jesus.
Josephus might have been born too late to have been around at the time that Jesus of Nazareth (were he a real person) was performing miracles… BUT… if your view is that “Mark” was based on earlier word-of-mouth (or written) stories, Josephus was in the right place and the right time to know as much as anybody else about Jesus of Nazareth… so why does he barely mention the fellow?
One passage of Josephus’ writing I find particularly interesting:
Now if any one consider these things, he will find that God takes care of mankind, and by all ways possible foreshows to our race what is for their preservation; but that men perish by those miseries which they madly and voluntarily bring upon themselves; for the Jews, by demolishing the tower of Antonia, had made their temple four-square, while at the same time they had it written in their sacred oracles, “That then should their city be taken, as well as their holy house, when once their temple should become four-square.” But now, what did the most elevate them in undertaking this war, was an ambiguous oracle that was also found in their sacred writings, how, “about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth.” The Jews took this prediction to belong to themselves in particular, and many of the wise men were thereby deceived in their determination. Now this oracle certainly denoted the government of Vespasian, who was appointed emperor in Judea. However, it is not possible for men to avoid fate, although they see it beforehand. But these men interpreted some of these signals according to their own pleasure, and some of them they utterly despised, until their madness was demonstrated, both by the taking of their city and their own destruction.
It is with all this in mind (and many other facts I have not mentioned here) that I think that Mark (the originally anonymous fictional work written in Rome in a Roman dialect for a Roman audience following Vespasian’s ascendency to Emperor of the mighty Roman Empire) Chapter 13 is clearly intending the message that Vespasian was the second coming of the Son of Man.
But to bring it back to what I really want to ask anybody who believes the narrative of the gospels:
Why doesn’t Josephus say much about Jesus of Nazareth?