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The only person that Josephus's AJ claims was messiah (ie christ) was Jesus. (I'll leave you all to follow that scent.)

There are people who Josephus indicates had pretentions that we would understand as messianic, but Josephus was writing an apologetic history of the Jews for Romans and if anyone in that history caused trouble for the Jews against the Romans he painted them in a bad light. He couldn't laud the actions of people who caused sedition against the overlords, could he?

We have glimpses of the notion of the Greek messiah from odd sources. Non-canonical Jewish texts such as the Psalms of Solomon touch on the Davidic messiah (eg PsS 18). There were at times two messiahs in Qumran literature, one of which was a military style figure. When Rabbi Aqiba described Simeon ben Kosibah as the messiah the purpose of this messiah was to liberate the Jews. These are the sorts of notions Josephus as a Jew had to grapple with in using the term "christ", so it's no wonder that he omitted it from his Roman oriented works.


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