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[TimOneill]

Would anyone like to have a stab at this:

Since it's clear Josephus' documents contain a whopping great christian forgery, is it possible to safely assume his other jesus references are not similarly forged? Is there some way to be fairly sure they were somehow "independent"?

Yes, there is. Origen quotes the key reference to James "brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah" when referring to Josephus' account of the death of James. He does this not once, not twice but three times. The key point here is that he was writing in the mid-third century AD. Christians weren't in a position to be doctoring manuscripts of Josephus until almost a century after that.

So the reference to James as "brother to that Jesus who was called Messiah" is most likely original to the text.

It's also very odd Greek. Grammatically it's in a form called the "casus pendens". That's a highly unusual and, in this context, grammatically awkward construction in Greek. But it's very common in Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic. Josephus was a native Aramaic speaker who, by his own admission, had Greek that could be a bit rough around the edges. So we find "Semiticisms" in his Greek - grammatical constructions that betray an Aramaic native getting his Greek slightly wrong. And what is the most common one we find in Josephus' work? The use of the "casus pendens" when it is not used in Greek. Just like here in "the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah".

So we have two solid reasons to conclude this key phrase is not an interpolation - one textual and the other stylistic/grammatical. It's this level of detail and knowledge that the online Mythers don't have. This is why I have little time for their weak arguments. They just parrot each other the way Creationists do, with no deep understanding of the material.