[Archelaos]

Josephus has a single paragraph about Jesus. It had been debated whether this is a later Christian interpolation into the manuscripts. The oldest manuscripts of Josephus' works that survived are from the 9th or 10th century. It might be possible that all our text witnesses go back to a single intermediate "Christian" Josephus. What speaks against such a conclusion is a) that (if I remember it correctly, I didn't cross-check) the passage uses the non-standard spelling "Chrestos" instead of "Christos", a so called iotacism, caused by a shift in the pronounciation of Ancient Greek where the sound of iota and eta morphed into each other, and b) that the paragraph appears in the context of Roman religious scandals, a quite unfavourable location. The counter-argument is that a clever forger has deliberately made a spelling mistake and chosen an unfavourable context to make his interpolation seem all the more credible.

Be that as it may, another aspect from Josephus is much more interesting, because it provides us with some context we would have otherwise missed: He tells us about other pretenders of the Messiah from that time, inluding the Roman suppression of this movements, and about John the Baptist in some detail. These passages are usually considered original.

[yyyk]

>Josephus has a single paragraph about Jesus. It had been debated whether this is a later Christian interpolation into the manuscripts.

Two different paragraphs to be exact. The first is accepted as at least a partial interpolation, while the second is usually accepted in full.