Two Visions of Jesus: Prince of Peace or Military Messiah?

It is popular among the intelligentsia to throw out what they call the "Victorian bourgeois concept" of "the kindly Jesus". This camp identifies themselves as the "realists", and they envision an "historical" Jesus as an angry, stern and militant prophet like most messianic figures that arose in his time and place. Scholars of this "redacted" Jesus claim that Jesus really imagined an imminent doomsday for the Romans, and that Jesus was only concerned with the welfare of the Jews. They also argue that Jesus had material political ambitions. However, Syrian and Egyptian Arabic translations of an uncorrupted Oriental text of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews provide a contemporary account by a fellow Jew of Jesus, in which the latter is pointedly not described as a pretender to military messiahship but as a praiseworthy rabbi, teacher, healer and honorable man of peace, whom Josephus felt had been wrongly executed. This account is from a Pharisee who had actually lived in the province of Galilee, Jesus' home territory. Such a description from Jesus' own time by a non-Christian Jew flies in the face of the current claim that Jesus as a figure of transcendent peace arose as a hopeful post-crucifixion concoction by his despairing disciples. Yes, Jesus could get angry, could grow impatient with moral inertia, could become vexed by hypocrisy, and he could employ the most rapier-like rhetoric with the reactionaries who challenged him. However, his one act of true wrath was specifically instigated by his righteous vehemence toward religious profiteering, was carried out alone, and did not constitute a political fracas with Roman authority, nor rally any group to acts of bodily violence against the Roman occupation. In fact, Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry teaching universal love and understanding, and he otherwise carried out acts of spiritual, mental and physical healing. Otherwise, Jesus also enjoyed sprinkling his teachings with a clever sense of humor. Getting back to the Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus would not have given such a positive report of Jesus had the latter been just like so many other radical religious leaders of the time, who claimed to be Messiah and led people to their destruction in the long odds game against the Empire of Rome. Josephus could have had no other reason than personal conviction for his brief testimony on Jesus, as the gentile audience he targeted for his book (an apologeticum of the Jews after their failed revolt) was otherwise indifferent to the then nascent Christian cult, which at the time was still largely a minor internal phenomenon of the Jewish world. The remembrances of Jesus as a peaceful teacher and healer are also too plentiful and sincerely detailed throughout the Gospels (both canonical and non-canonical) for these qualities to be posthumous fabrications or only marginal aspects of his identity when alive. Josephus' objectivity is impeccable, as he did not convert to Christianity, and he was retrospectively unsparing in his criticism of religious leaders who used Judaism for political and military purposes. It makes sense that Jesus would be one of the few religious figures to whom Josephus would give such plain and honest praise, if Jesus were just what most Christians today think of him: the Prince of Peace.