Jesus DNA

[graemer]

Would it be possible to find traces of DNA of Jesus?

[Clanad]

Obviously, this exchange has gone far afield of the originally posed question.  However, as a closing comment (so as not leave untied loose ends) I would comment that Flavius Josephus was certainly not a dedicated Jew, considering his Roman heritage and support of Emperor Vespasian (hence his Latinized name Flavian). However, that said, I find the following quote important to this discussion:

In 1995 a discovery was published that brought important new evidence to the debate over the Testimonium Flavianum. 

    For the first time it was pointed out that Josephus' description of Jesus showed an unusual similarity with another early description of Jesus.  
    It was established statistically that the similarity was too close to have appeared by chance.  
    Further study showed that Josephus' description was not derived from this other text, but rather that both were based on a Jewish-Christian "gospel" that has since been lost.  For the first time, it has become possible to prove that the Jesus account cannot have been a complete forgery and even to identify which parts were written by Josephus and which were added by a later interpolator. 

Available fully here:

  http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/testimonium.htm

At the very least one has to agree that it's interesting reading...

[graemer]

You guys have certainly given me a lot reading to catch up! Thank you for the in-depth (mostly) posts and luckily I am very interested in the Turin Shroud.

Thanks to all who posted. Graeme