I am skeptical about placing much weight on the received location of the expulsion story. The block of text would flow nicely from the mention of Germanicus's death some hundreds of words earlier, and not just because that incident, too, is datable to 19 CE. "Flow" arguments are frankly aesthetic; maybe Josephus wanted to skip back and forth both in space and (perhaps) also in time.
One observation I think many here will agree with is that the first words of the expulsion block occur just after a text which has been substantially altered over the centuries. Whether or not Josephus mentioned Jesus versus Pilate, what we receive on that subject was probably not written by Josephus alone.
Similarly, I suspect that just after the beginning of the received expulsion block lies a long, long stretch of editorial alteration, the story of Paulina and Mundus. As with the Testimony, I don't have a strong opinion about whether Josephus himself wrote something about Paulina and Mundus that has been improved since then, or whether what we read is entirely someone else's work.
I explained the foundations for my suspicions that Josephus is not the sole author of this tale a few years ago on the Uncertaintist blog,
https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... f-paulina/
That posting as a whole is premised on the usual dating of Pilate's term (26-36 CE), which I happen to accept. However, the issue of authenticity is discussed more-or-less independently starting at the heading "Is the Paulina story credible and authentic?"
In brief compass, I find it anomalous that:
(1) The story is written as if it were the treatment of a fictive stage farce, an inversion of Plautus's Amphitryon
(2) The story runs about 4 times the length of the story about the Jewish crooks and the expulsion-conscription of thousands
(3) The story is about 10 times the length needed to convey everything relevant or parallel to the Jewish expulsion story
(4) There is a mass of digressive "literary" detail (e.g. Mundus's suicidal ideation and Paulina's leisurely progressive disillusionment after she's been seduced) - "Josephus" is in no rush to return to his account of a dramatic Jewish catastrophe
(5) There are no Jewish characters in sight
(6) Josephus doesn't claim that there is any connection between Paulina and Mundus and the Jewish disaster:
- He never mentions that followers of the Egyptian religion were expelled at the same time as the Jews
- No mass expulsion occurs in the Paulina and Mundus story itself: nobody except the few individuals involved suffers
- The only character who is forced to leave Rome is Mundus, who does not follow the Egyptian religion
- We don't know that an incident like this, even if one happened, was why the followers of the Egyptian religion were expelled from Rome
We only know about the commonalities between the two stories from later writers. If all we had was the received Josephus, then the strangeness of Paulina and Mundus would be even more immediately apparent.
Of course, my worst suspicions about Paulina and Mundus could be true, and the Jewish expulsion story could still have always been located amidst the Pilate material. Nevertheless, I have difficulty placing much weight on its received location when I suspect that that location is riddled with shennanigans.