Christian Texts and History • Zinner's argument about the Testimonium Flavianum and Emmaus

On this much I agree with Goldberg: his previous demonstration that the TF is just mindlessly, uncritically, and slavishly copied from the Emmaus narrative in Luke is in my opinion conclusive (see Gary Goldberg, “The Coincidences of the Testimonium of Josephus and the Emmaus Narrative of Luke,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 13 (1995): 59–77). The probability of that conclusion, on the evidence he presented, simply beats all alternatives now

...of extreme interest is that there is in fact a literary relation between the Testimonium Flavianum and Luke’s Emmaus story, which Gary J. Goldberg has identified.56 It is their uniquely shared language in the statement “he appeared to them again spending a third day restored to life,” rather than the more familiar “on the third day.” How do we explain this relationship? One might argue that Josephus’ text in this instance includes expressions not typical of Josephus, and suggest Luke has been used to alter Josephus to some extent at least. On the other hand, one can counter that Josephus used many sources, and some of these could have contained language atypical of Josephus which he decided to reproduce more or less literally. However, because we know Luke has used Josephus elsewhere, the most parsimonious explanation is that Luke is paraphrasing Josephus.