Ancient Manuscript May Contain Early Written Account of Jesus' Resurrection, Researcher Suggests

A researcher has identified wording in an ancient text that he argues may preserve a first-century written account of Jesus rising from the dead, according to a new analysis.

The passage in question, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, appears in Jewish Antiquities, a history of the Jewish people written by the historian Flavius Josephus around AD 93 to 94. Independent researcher Jesús Fernández-Pedrera Correa, from Spain, compared Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac versions of the text to investigate which elements might have survived from the original account.

While the surviving Greek version states that Jesus appeared alive on the third day and links the event to biblical prophecy, the Latin version says, 'he appeared to them the third day alive.' The Arabic account specifically presents the appearance as something reported by Jesus's disciples.

Fernández-Pedrera Correa suggests that this variation in wording could preserve an earlier passage where Josephus recorded what Jesus’s followers claimed to have seen. The researcher's analysis, released in August, revisited these translated versions and argued that their differences offer clues to the passage's earlier form.

The researcher points to phrasing in the Greek version that sounds more like Christian preaching than a non-Christian historian's account. The Greek text states: ‘He appeared to them alive again on the third day, the divine prophets having foretold these and countless other wonders about him.’ Fernández-Pedrera Correa highlights the reference to fulfilled prophecy as particularly Christian language, questioning whether Josephus would have written the sentence in this form. He notes that Josephus elsewhere recorded the beliefs and reports of Jewish religious groups without necessarily accepting them himself, suggesting he might have treated the experiences described by Jesus’s followers similarly.

This distinction, the researcher posits, offers a possible explanation for how an earlier historical report could have evolved into a stronger statement of Christian belief. However, Fernández-Pedrera Correa acknowledges that this reconstruction remains unproven and that the surviving versions cannot definitively establish how much of the resurrection reference Josephus originally wrote.

Scholars have long scrutinized other statements within the Testimonium Flavianum that appear to express Christian beliefs, leading to suspicions that they were added after Josephus's time. The clearest point of contention concerns the declaration that Jesus 'was the Christ.' The Latin, Arabic, and Syriac versions soften this assertion, suggesting he was believed or thought to be the Messiah. The researcher also references early Christian writer Origen, who stated that Josephus did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. Together, these clues provide strong evidence that the direct declaration was not the passage's original wording, according to the researcher.

Another disputed phrase questions whether Jesus should be called a man, implying a more-than-human nature. This phrase is absent from the Arabic account but present in the Latin and Syriac versions. The researcher argues that its absence could reflect a later shortening of the passage, leaving less direct evidence that the phrase was a subsequent addition. Fernández-Pedrera Correa expresses more confidence in the closing statement that Jesus's followers continued to exist in the historian's own day, finding its wording and subject matter consistent with Josephus's writing habits and noting a lack of comparable disagreement across the different versions at that point.