Editing Josephus on Jesus (section)

=== Paraphrase model ===
The ''paraphrase model'', advanced by G. J. Goldberg in 2022, is based on the observation that Josephus wrote most of the ''Jewish Antiquities'' by paraphrasing Greek and Hebrew sources.<ref name="Goldberg2022">{{Cite journal |last=Goldberg |first=Gary J. |date=Feb 2022 |title=Josephus's Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum |url=https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/jshj/20/1/article-p1_2.xml |journal=Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus |volume=20 |issue=1 |pages=1–32 |doi=10.1163/17455197-bja10003 |s2cid=244296505 |doi-access=free}}</ref> Goldberg proposes that the Jesus passage in the ''Antiquities'' is also a paraphrase in the same manner. Josephus's methods of revising his sources have been well established and can be used to objectively test whether a proposed candidate source could have been adapted in the same way for the Jesus passage. In a phrase-by-phrase study, Goldberg finds that the Jesus account can be derived from Luke's Emmaus narrative using transformations Josephus is demonstrated to have employed in paraphrasing known sources for the ''Antiquities''. He finds these paraphrase precedents in word adoption, word and phrase substitution, content order preservation and content modification. As these stylistic pairings are unlike the relationships found among any other ancient Jesus texts, Goldberg proposes the most plausible explanation of these findings is that the Jesus passage in the ''Antiquities'' is indeed Josephus's paraphrase of a Christian text very much like, if not identical to, Luke's Emmaus narrative (Luke 24:18–24).

This paraphrase model, Goldberg argues, is not only a natural application of Josephus's writing processes but also resolves the questions that researchers have raised about the passage, shedding light on the origin of specific difficult phrases and accounting for its brevity and its mixture of Josephan language with a Christian credal structure. While many had previously suspected that an original Josephus passage had been edited by a later Christian to give the credal appearance, the paraphrase model argues such edits cannot explain the end-to-end consistency of a paraphrase relationship with the Emmaus text. The more plausible explanation is rather the reverse: an original Christian document was edited by Josephus by applying his usual revision method for the ''Antiquities''.

The historical implications of the model, Goldberg argues, include the following. First, it shows Jesus was a historical figure and not a myth, based on the reasoning that Josephus's treatment of his source indicates he thought it reliable; it must have conformed with what he knew of events under Pilate. The model also provides unique evidence about the dating of at least one passage of Luke's Gospel. And as the paraphrase shows Josephus had obtained a Christian source and treated it with a degree of respect, it provides an unexpected window into a cordial relationship between Christians and Jews in Rome at the end of the first century.