Why do professional historians give more credence to Josephus than, say, the gospels?
Professional historians, I think, try to assemble all of the evidence that’s available for reconstructing an event. And they’re concerned about the bias in any of those sources that they use. And at the first stage in reconstructing an event is to analyze the bias of sources. We had to do so both with the sources internal to Christianity as well as the sources external to Christianity. So the gospels, for instance, are clearly statements of faith and they have certain takes on who Jesus was and what he meant to his followers. External sources like Josephus don’t have the same faith commitment, they may have some other axes to grind, but in any case you have to see what the biases of the sources are, and try to take those into account as you do your reconstruction. Shaye I.D. Cohen: Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies Brown University What can we really know about the life of Jesus? Are we dealing with facts here? Are we dealing with bits an
