Quote Originally Posted by Brenus
“I believe it's widely accepted by historians” Not really. This passage is highly suspect, on contrary. It doesn’t match with the rest of the text, in content and style.
Flavius Joseph himself is questionable about his biography. What he pretended to be and studied is hardly believable. Well in fact it can’t be true. More, living under the reign of Nero, it is difficult to imagine he will write such thing about the Christians.

Flavius Josephus wrote first work, the Jewish War, in Aramaic, and presented it to Vespasian between 75 and 79. An assistant translated it into the language of scholars of his days, Greek. So, you can see there is a lot a possibilities to transform and modified the texts, and even more after, during the development of Christianity, when the only people doing that were the one who had a big interest to show that Christ was a reality.
Allow me to refer to wikipedia:
Over the last century, the consensus seems to have changed, and the subjective nature of many of the arguments used in the 19th century has been recognized. Judging from the 2003 survey of the historiography, it seems that the majority of modern scholars consider that Josephus really did write something here about Jesus, but that the text that has reached us is corrupt to a perhaps quite substantial extent. In the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia entry for Flavius Josephus, "The passage seems to suffer from repeated interpolations." There has been no consensus on which portions are corrupt, or to what degree.
Of course, I dont have access to the survey the author references.

Take from it what you will, but I find it much more likely that a reference to Jesus was embelished in later transcriptions rather than wholly fabricated and arbitrarily inserted.