The Josephus passage on Jesus has been heavily altered as most scholars would acknowledge. We also have a version of this passage preserved by an Arabic writer (discovered in the 1970s by Shlomo Pines, I believe) which is a century older than our oldest Greek copies of the Josephean passage. In the Arabic version, Jewish leaders are not mentioned, only PIlate.

As for other info in Josephus, he gives an example of Jewish leaders refusing to turn over some Jewish troublemakers to the procurator Gessius Florus who demanded they be turned over. Florus threatened otherwise to take revenge and he did when Jewish leaders did not comply. Josephus also gives examples of Jewish leaders begging a Jewish mob to change their actions so that Rome would not take further reprisals. They never arrest any Jews and turn them over to Rome and they never even threaten to do such a thing. It simply does not fit the historical context that Jewish leaders would cooperate with Rome to have a Jew executed. Josephus is very clear about that.

As for the NT, we have Paul saying at Acts 13:28 that there was no Jewish death penalty against Jesus. Also, there is none in either Luke or John. John 18 also tells us that Annas, a retired high priest, questioned Jesus which suggests the possibility that this was a diplomatic affair (aimed at saving Jesus), not a hostile trial. Moreover, the details of the so-called trial scene in the Marcan/Matthean narrative do not fit what would a Jewish trial would be like. It is either an informal meeting or a lynching, and most scholars gave up making the charge of a lynching or judicial murder long ago. So if you try to maintain the traditional story of how Jesus died, there are many contradictions to that in the NT.

There is more than enough info in the NT to make you wonder whether they were not in fact preserving many accurate details from a very different story than the one we are used to. One sign that there really is something here is the fact that most scholars do not like discussing a lot of this evidence. You would be hard put to find anyone who will admit that Acts 13:28 even exists. (I know of only a couple.) Debate about all the evidence, not just some of it, has always been suppressed in this field. It is a fixed case against Jewish leaders (and Judas) not a well-reasoned one.

Leon Zitzer