Josephus and other contemporaries on Jesus

[Minimalist]

The James reference seems authentic to my eyes, though. Because if you remove the "who was called Christ", then we don't know which Jesus he's talking about.

One of the big problems with translating from one language to another is that some of the nuance gets lost.  Famously everyone knows the Yiddish word chutzpah but an actual translation is more problematic.  You end up describing chutzpah - the suspect admitted killing his parents and then asked for clemency because he was an orphan - rather than defining the word from Yiddish to English.

So with the phrase tou legomenou christo we have a similar problem.  It implies giving an appellation or name.  But I have seen scholars point out that it can equally mean:

"called"
"so-called"
"named"
"known as"
and a couple of others.

But you must ask yourself what christos meant to Josephus?  Remember, he was a jew from a priestly ( i.e. noble ) family.  To him the phrase was "moschiach" or "maschiach" and referred to the practice of anointing the king and/or high priest in sacred oil.  The translation into the Greek word chrio refers to the covering with oil.  Now, in the Book XX reference, virtually everyone named except the two Romans, was a christos at one time or another.  Unlike the TF which is a bald-faced lie I do not think the Book XX reference is much more than some later xtian scribe coming across the word "christos," wetting his loin cloth in joy, and shouting "I FOUND HIM!"  

But Josephus makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of troublemakers and considers them rightfully executed by the powers that be.

Of course news traveled a great deal more slowly then.

But it did travel and one of Herod the Great's best moves was to build the port of Caesarea which connected the shitty little backwater of Judaea to the Roman sea-borne trade network. It may have traveled slowly but the story of a man, lawfully executed by a Roman magistrate who then comes back to life would have been BIG FUCKING NEWS across the empire and would have been seen as a repudiation of the magistrate and therefore the emperor. And there would have been no hushing that up.