Toto

Lowder is not a historian. He has a background in philosophy and an interest in debate. His article represents a posture in a debate - he can accept Josephus as partially reliable, since many scholars do, and still reject Josh McDowell's apologetics. As a debater, he is not interested in getting into areas that are too far removed from his main point or that might be too esoteric for his audience.

If you read what Lowder has in the II Library, he takes a fairly conventional view of Jesus as not divine, but a 1st century cult leader who sparked a new religion. That's a fairly defensible position that doesn't get Christians too upset, compared to mythicism.

I would not take that article as the last word on the subject, and I don't even know if Lowder would still agree with it. His colleague Richard Carrier has now accepted mythicism as a better explanation of the evidence.

You can find a lot of prior discussion here on the reference to James the brother of Jesus. I think that it was most likely a marginal note from a Christian interpolator, who thought that he was just adding something that should have been there, that got worked into the main text.

RUmike

Toto, do you believe these passages to be interpolations in their entirety?

Toto

Yes. That issue has been discussed to death here, and I don't think anyone has anything new to say.

gregor

Would doubts about references be more probative of content, rather than existence?

In other words, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that some type of Xian movement was at least noteworthy by 96 CE or 120 CE? A debate about interpolations in Josephus or Pliny may be valid and useful to challenge the content of a narrative, but wouldn't the movement have been large enough to not surprisingly have merited a mention by someone at this time?

I've never read anyone strongly asserting that there was no growing movement following something or someone bearing the name Jesus in mid first century NE that might not merit a comment (i.e. an argument that Xianity did not exist until 120 CE or that a deity/person/idea named "Jesus" was not invented/discovered until after 120 CE).

Toto

The theory has been posited that Chistianity was an outgrowth of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE, and that the Christian narrative was backdated to the earlier part of the century. The lack of any mention of Christianity before that date might be significant.

The only evidence of a pre-70 CE Christianity is contained in the gospels and Acts, which Christians strain to date as early as 68 CE, and the letters of Paul, which have been dated using the chronology of Acts, which was written most likely in the second century.