illustrious 228.ill.991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The third class of scholars believe that the whole passage concerning Jesus, as it is found today in Josephus, is genuine. The main arguments for the genuineness of the Josephan passage are the following:

* First, all codices or manuscripts of Josephus's work contain the text in question; to maintain the spuriousness of the text, we must suppose that all the copies of Josephus were in the hands of Christians, and were changed in the same way.
* Second, it is true that neither Tertullian nor St. Justin makes use of Josephus's passage concerning Jesus; but this silence is probably due to the contempt with which the contemporary Jews regarded Josephus, and to the relatively little authority he had among the Roman readers. Writers of the age of Tertullian and Justin could appeal to living witnesses of the Apostolic tradition.
* Third, Eusebius ("Hist. Eccl"., I, xi; cf. "Dem. Ev.", III, v) Sozomen (Hist. Eccl., I, i), Niceph. (Hist. Eccl., I, 39), Isidore of Pelusium (Ep. IV, 225), St. Jerome (catal.script. eccles. xiii), Ambrose, Cassiodorus, etc., appeal to the testimony of Josephus; there must have been no doubt as to its authenticity at the time of these illustrious writers.
* Fourth, the complete silence of Josephus as to Jesus would have been a more eloquent testimony than we possess in his present text; this latter contains no statement incompatible with its Josephan authorship: the Roman reader needed the information that Jesus was the Christ, or the founder of the Christian religion; the wonderful works of Jesus and His Resurrection from the dead were so incessantly urged by the Christians that without these attributes the Josephan Jesus would hardly have been acknowledged as the founder of Christianity.

All this does not necessarily imply that Josephus regarded Jesus as the Jewish Messias; but, even if he had been convinced of His Messiahship, it does not follow that he would have become a Christian. A number of posssible subterfuges might have supplied the Jewish historian with apparently sufficient reasons for not embracing Christianity.

footnote 663.oo Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

An article released from the CIA's internal "Studies in Intelligence" reveals the existence of a National Security Agency paranormal program, which was previously reported based upon information provided by unnamed sources.

A footnote found in an article written by Gerald K. Haines for the CIA's classified "Studies in Intelligence" confirms the existence of a rumored National Security Agency psychic research program.

Gerald K. Haines is the National Reconnaissance Office historian.

Previously, sources to STARpod.org, including one of the psychics who worked with the program following 9/11, identified the NSA as the successor to the now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency program nick-named STAR GATE. The STAR GATE program was made public in 1995.

The footnote is found in the declassified CIA-published article called "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90: A Die-Hard Issue." The article is available to read at the CIA's website.

Haines writes, "CIA also maintained Intelligence Community coordination with other agencies regarding their work in parapsychology, psychic phenomena, and 'remote viewing' experiments. In general, the Agency took a conservative scientific view of these unconventional scientific issues."

He then adds in the footnote, "There is a DIA Psychic Center and the NSA studies parapsychology, that branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of such psychic phenomena as clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and telepathy."