Yale PhD | Princeton University Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program (2025-2026) | Fairfield University Associate Professor
Joined March 2025
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T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Pir Natal (Christmas mat) from the Asmat people of Indonesian Papua. Showing Mary giving birth in a traditional Asmat forest camp. Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Happy to announce I built a Greek/English reader site with all the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, & Aristophanes.
Multiple translations for each play; click to parse & define for any Greek word; full Greek & English search.
greekdrama.johnhboyer.com
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Think of it as a reversal of “The Da Vinci Code.” A professor of religious studies has written a work of genuine scholarship that affirms Christian traditions with a new interpretation of an ancient text.
My latest: Unlocking the Josephus Code wsj.com/opinion/free-express… via @WSJFreeEx
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Google Books is becoming a desert. Its regress is real: the knowledge we were assured was both safely stored and freely available, which led libraries and schools to get rid of their books, has retreated into the shadows. The internet of 2026 knows less than the internet of 2010.
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
French researcher cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran - France 24
france24.com/en/french-resea…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Everyone should follow Roger Pearse. He is a one-man collating/translating/commentating machine for all things ancient. He has his own link on CCEL and puts out his own translation work for free. A saint!
tertullian.org/rpearse/index…
A major discovery! 30 additional lines of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (444 BC) was found in a papyrus. Such finds are extremely rare—Empedocles was one of the last philosophers to write purely in verse not prose. He tried to prove he was divine by jumping into a volcano, it did not end well!
Read an excellent summary by @roger_pearse
roger-pearse.com/weblog/2026…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Madison's Notes is out with a new episode in the series: "The Gospel According to Josephus."
In light of Easter and Passover this week, @ProfTCSchmidt spoke with host @RyanShinkel on the final days of Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity as depicted in the ancient Jewish historian's writings.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Rereading *Josephus and Jesus* in preparation for our event on Monday—a debate btwn @ProfTCSchmidt & Giovanni Bazzana! For a FREE PDF of this Open Access book = josephusandjesus.com/purchas…
ALT Gray tabby cat “helping” me read the book
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
TODAY is Good Friday, the anniversary of Jesus Christ's crucifixion.
To learn about the context in which those events took place, @ProfTCSchmidt talked with @RyanShinkel about the best outside source for the Biblical world: Flavius Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Thomas Schmidt, "Jesus in the Writings of Josephus: Stylistic and Social Networking Analysis", Seminar on Jewish History & Literature in the Graeco-Roman Period, 2 PM Tuesday 4 November, OCHJS and Zoom. nt4ox.link/JHLSemM25
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
A 6th-century manuscript containing a Syriac translation of Plutarch's "How to Profit from One's Enemies" (Mor. 6) from St. Catherine's of Sinai. (n.b. Plutarch's works were never translated into Arabic.)
ALT https://www.loc.gov/resource/amedmonastery.00279386292-ms/?sp=81&r=-0.285,-0.013,1.722,0.784,0
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Honestly one of the best books I've read in the past decade.
For twenty years I’ve taught the standard scholarly view of the Testimonium Flavianum — the short passage about Jesus in the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. The consensus says Josephus wrote a brief, neutral remark about Jesus, later “improved” by a naughty Christian scribe to make the line sound more positive.
But this brand-new Oxford University Press book by Tom Schmidt might just have changed my mind. And tomorrow I get to interview him for Undeceptions.
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Huge thanks to @Brepols for massively improving the search interface for The Library of Latin Texts (LLT). It works like a dream!
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Curious Cures completed: hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts now accessible lib.cam.ac.uk/stories/curiou…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Every decade or so, there's an exceptional work of scholarship that appears in academia. @ProfTCSchmidt's hugely-enjoyable Josephus and Jesus, newly published by @OxUniPress, is one such title.
josephusandjesus.com/purchas…
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
This is the second earliest manuscript of Rufinus's version of Josephus's testimony on Jesus (the Testimonium Flavianum). Unlike the previous, this one does not contain the variant "was believed to be the Christ" (credebatur esse Christus) and instead has Josephus claiming that Jesus "was the Christ" — which sounds much less authentic.
So what is the original translation Rufinus made since the second and third earliest manuscripts disagree? I'll post the earliest manuscript in a bit.
Bibliothèque nationale de France Lat. 18282 folio 27r lines 19-24, 27v lines 1-8
Here is folio 27r:
And folio 27v:
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Well, well, well - if this measures up to the blurb and the excellent scholarly endorsements, it may set a cat among some very startled pigeons. 🤨
josephusandjesus.com/
T.C. Schmidt retweeted
Just one bread crumb, since Gopnik gives oxygen to the claim that the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus is a forgery in its entirety (!), I hope the New Yorker will give similar attention to this forthcoming work on the subject:
barnesandnoble.com/w/josephu…
