A Jew, a truth-lover, speaking concerning the Precursor[1] and concerning our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Child of Matthias, priest of Jerusalem; the one who wrote the Jewish Antiquities in twenty books. This man, taken by Vespasian with Titus his son, survived the capture of Jerusalem and having come with him [Vespasian] to Rome, produced for the emperors seven books of the capture of Jerusalem. These very ones were bestowed to the public library, and because of the fame of the narrative he was honored by a statue. And he also wrote the twenty books of the Jewish Antiquities, from the beginning of the world until the fourteenth year of Caesar Domitian.[2] Also two other books against the grammarian Apion of Alexandria,[3] who was sent as an ambassador to Caligula from the faction of the Greeks in order to bring a charge against Philo[4] by some story, for they were prejudiced against the surrounding Jewish nation. There is also another book of his [called] About a complete self-reckoning, altogether excellent, in which even the suffering of the Maccabees is remembered. In the eighteenth book of the Antiquities this man manifestly confesses the Christ (because of the mass of signs) to have been slain by the Jews and John the Baptist to have truly been a prophet and, on account of the slaughter of the apostle James, Jerusalem to have been besieged. And he writes about our Lord Jesus thus: 'about this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if in fact it is of necessity to call him a man at all. For he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who received the truth with gladness, and he attracted even many Jews and also many Gentiles. This was the Christ. Even when Pilate had condemned him to the cross on the evidence of the leading men among us, those loving him at the first did not cease [loving him]. For he appeared to them again living after waiting for a third day, the godly prophets having said these and thousands of other marvelous things about him; and even now, the race of those having named Christians after him has not has not died out.' Josephus says such things about Christ in the 18th book.[5]