send a man to the gallows, they can have no more than a reasonable
assurance that he is guilty; when they acquit him, they can have no
more than a reasonable assurance that he is innocent. Positive
assurance is unattainable. The dogmatist is the only one who claims to
possess absolute certainty. But his claim is no more than a groundless
assumption. When, therefore, we learn that Josephus, for instance, who
lived in the same country and about the same time as Jesus, and wrote
an extensive history of the men and events of his day and country,
does not mention Jesus, except by interpolation, which even a
Christian clergyman, Bishop Warburton, calls "a rank forgery, and a
very stupid one, too," we can be reasonably sure that no such Jesus as
is described in the New Testament, lived about the same time and in
the same country with Josephus.

The failure of such a historian as Josephus to mention Jesus tends to
make the existence of Jesus at least reasonably doubtful.

Few Christians now place any reliance upon the evidence from Josephus.
The early Fathers made this Jew admit that Jesus was the Son of God.
Of course, the admission was a forgery. De Quincey says the passage is
known to be "a forgery by all men not lunatics." Of one other supposed
reference in Josephus, Canon Farrar says: "This passage was early
tampered with by the Christians." The same writer says this of a third
passage: "Respecting the third passage in Josephus, the only question
is whether it be partly or entirely spurious." Lardner, the great
English theologian, was the first man to prove that Josephus was a
poor witness for Christ.

In examining the evidence from profane writers we must remember that
the silence of one contemporary author is more important than the