Now, until this passage John had not yet been mentioned by Josephus who, we recall, had also not named the Samaritain messiah (for whom he certainly had no admiration).
Immediate thereafter, §2 continues with the account of the just and pious man who baptized peacefully and was beloved by the multitude. The paragraph ends virtually the same way it began: “So the Jews believed that the destruction of this army…” This paragraph is the only one in which the surviving Greek versions of Josephus mention John the Baptist by name.19
On the face of it, we here have an interpolated paragraph bracketed by a repetition.20 A Christian evidently wanted to insert an account of the forerunner of Jesus together with praise in his regard. He did so in order to combat the preceding passage (regarding the unnamed Samaritan upstart, XVIII.4.1) which he felt included perfidious material regarding John.21 The interpolator needed to show that John was not an agitator but a peaceful and good prophet. In this way Josephus—a historian who viewed the Samaritans as troublemakers—is made to contradict himself in his own writing.
http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2012/09/ ... -ory-pt-6/ (my bold)
In the his article, Georges Ory had to build a complex theorema to connect John the Baptist with the Samaritan Prophet.
But there is a recent scholar article (dated 2000) that makes even more easily the connection of John with Samaria:
John the Baptist, The Wilderness and the Samaritan Mission
The article can be read entirely here:
https://books.google.it/books?id=v-t5Dw ... on&f=false
The point of the article is that the wilderness where John baptized was probably in Samaria, not in Judea.
Hence, even if John was historical and even if he was not the Samaritan Prophet condemned by Josephus, the Christian interpolator was obliged to distance more explicitly two figures working in the same place: Samaria.
By interpolating Josephus.