That is Goldberg’s argument. That is the argument I refute in this very article. Please read the article.

…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. 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.

It seems that he agrees with you that there is indeed a relation between the TF and Luke’s Emmaus, only it is Luke who would be based on Josephus and not vice versa.

The Gospels, if they could be shown to be even decades-later compiled stories, would be something. Probably still too mythical and from people too predisposed to propaganda and bias to be trustworthy, but at least something one would consider. I’ve been watching Behind the Bastards recently, and Robert consistently will cite from biographies and accounts that he knows are probably propagandistic but does so just to get the full range of detail on the story.

But these ostensible contemporary accounts just say nothing. The TF goes into no details on what early Christians believed, what other sects thought of them and Jesus, or really any actually useful details about Jesus’ life. At best, Josephus apparently would have gotten snookered by wild stories.

And the James brother of Jesus is if anything worse. It superficially reads like endorsement of Christian doctrine, but if taken seriously it would imply… a wild array of things. Was Jesus actually in the priestly category and actually the son of Damneus rather than Joseph? Was James stoned before Jesus? There’s absolutely no way to read that account honestly as squaring with any of our details in the Gospels. Which would only, at best, testify to this guy being so heavily mythologized that even sober historians are disagreeing with the ostensible eyewitness accounts.

The fact that this is evidence worth working this hard for shows how empty their hand is.

P.S. Possibly you weren’t aware of the fact that in Goldberg’s “previous demonstration” I am there referring to, he bracketed the question of who “mindlessly, uncritically, and slavishly copied” Luke for future examination. He states his opinion, of course, but admits it is yet unproved (he had not yet written this later article arguing from paraphrasis technique), and there offers a gamut of possibilities as still on the table, including the traditional one I am referring to: “a sophisticated forger deliberately rewrote Luke 24.18–27” and inserted it into Josephus.

No. One statement says Josephus did this. The other statement says someone else did this.

Odds are, it was someone else. That’s my point.

Indeed. See related comment.

He avoids the question as best I can tell. I assume his position would be that Josephus got all that stuff from Luke, not the other way around. That is a convoluted and difficult hypothesis to maintain (it has the least explanatory power), but it’s his only logical option (other than to insist all the evidence is just coincidental, which requires leaning on a defeating improbability).

But you are right to mention this is another piece of evidence against Goldberg’s thesis.

The first thing I thought was, wouldn’t all the evidence that Luke/Acts used Josephus AJ rule out his theory from the start? Does he address the likes of Steve Mason and others who have pretty securely demonstrated that the influence goes the other direction to what Goldberg is trying to argue?

It’s not impossible. The author could have written Luke, then read Jewish Antiquities, then written Acts. But it’s a bit of a stretch.

“Did Josephus write his paragraph about Jesus by slavishly copying Luke? No.”

and

“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”