Based on his name I'd say there's a good chance Josephus (note: Latin for "Joseph") was Jesus' mother.

No, seriously, AR282, when you write things like this:

To say that Jesus was whipped and scourged in Jerusalem because Josephus wrote of it--maybe the details are different but there's the kernel of it--is problematic when we remember the event Josephus wrote of happened AFTER the bible story not before. The gospels were supposedly already written and so there is no possible way Josephus could have been talking about a person who served as the model of Jesus Christ in the narrative. Yet the coincidences are too great to write off as chance. The ONLY conclusion then that can be reached is that the gospel writers pulled the material from Josephus and modified it for their purposes. Then they backdated the material to make it look earlier than Josephus in the apparent hope of not looking like they copied him but they apparently forgot that the events he wrote of had not yet happened at their backdate. It sticks out like a sore thumb with "FRAUD!" written on it.

you make it hard to take you seriously. It is patently absurd to say that anything is "the ONLY conclusion … that can be reached" about this sort of thing. And knowing that one will only be berated and accused of mendacious stupidity for having pointed out such an obvious truth makes it that much less likely that you will be seriously engaged.

For what it's worth, I am a Christian and I am reasonably sure that Josephus wrote in the same general period as the canonical gospel writers/compilers. (By which I mean the last thirty years of the first century, basically. I'm inclined to think that even Mark postdates the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 70.)

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of actual coincidence that there is in the world. Plenty to account, for example, for the parallels between the Jesus Josephus writes about without positing that Jesus of Nazareth is based on him.

I'm still unclear, too, in what period you place the "royals" that you assert pulled the whole thing off. Based on what you have written in this thread it looks to me like these royals may have been just about anytime between the late first century and the early fourth century.

Haruo