Originally posted by doodinthemood
The Josephus references have been known to be fake for a while now. In fact, an in-depth grammatical study needn't even be done, read the passage for yourself:
"About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and as a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. ...[text shortened]... t him."
Now, is that the writing of a non-christian source, or a later christian addition?
Actually, most scholarly works agree that the basics of the passage were written by Josephus with some of things added later. So it is considered to be good extra-biblical evidence that Jesus existed and that people thought he did many amazing things. But not necessarily that he was actually raised from the dead or that he was more than a prophet.
I read a good article that compared Josephus to the Emmaus story in Luke which concluded that both passages probably came from the same earlier source. In general you need to be careful about "facts" determined by high level texual criticism because it can be easily forgotten that, no matter how convincing the arguement, we still do not have the proposed manuscripts.
So, no matter how similar Josephus and Luke are, we don't have the earlier "common source". Even if one feels that a Jew like Josephus would never write the passage as presented we still only have the passage as presented. That is why most scholars take the middle ground and say that the Josephus passage is good evidence that Jesus did indeed exist, but not evidence that Josephus actually thought he was the Messiah.