Toto

Historicity is a modern concern (or obsession,) now that we are all materialists of some sort, and have explored space and the earth, and know that there are no heavens up above or hell below us. In the first century, you don't see people, even Christians, arguing against other religions because their sacred myths didn't really happen. The lack of existence of Zeus or Osiris or Mithras was just not relevant. Why should Jesus' lack of existence bother anyone?

aa5874

But, Peter Kirby's quote is mis-leading. Actually, one will search in vain to find some example of a messianic pretender who was called Jesus, Christ or "Jesus Christ" in any non-apologetic 1st century literature, except for the questionable passages of Josephus.

And even in the Gospels, according to the authors, Jesus refered to himself as the son of man, and was called son of David, Elias, John the Baptist or one of the prophets, only during his trial in gMark, did Jesus claim he was Christ.
And furthermore, only demons, the devil, and the God of Moses recognised Jesus as Christ and called him by that title "Christ", according to scripture.

Even to this day, Jews do not recognise Jesus or call him Christ.

jjramsey

An inflamed copyist would tend to produce something like the TF, though, not something coldly calculated to look authentic.

Even still, core players like Paul should be in the thick of such controversies, yet the case for a documentation of such controversies in his work, or any other NT writer, for that matter, is dicey at best.

True but misleading. You do see the gods being written off as the deceptions of demons (1 Cor. 10:20, 1 Tim. 4:1), or described offhandedly as myths (2 Peter 1:16). Ok, I'm dipping into the early second century a bit, but you get the idea. The OT arguably sets a precedent for first century Jewish writers, too, as when in Isaiah 44:13-20, where the idea that something fashioned by human hands could possibly be a god is mocked. The concept of competing groups' sacred beliefs being simply false was not foreign to them, so the idea that the "lack of existence of Zeus or Osiris or Mithras was just not relevant" is dicey at best.

hatsoff

By "inflamed" I don't mean you to picture some ancient Jewish scribe with steam shooting out of his ears while he violently scrawls unspoken tirades. I simply suggest that a contemporary controversy tends to generate active interest among those who come into contact with it. One would not be surprised to find a copyist affected such that he "coldly calculated" a forgery to combat what he saw as heresy.

Doherty's MJ thesis posits that the controversy arose during the Jewish War, after Paul's death.

Ben C Smith

I can just see it:

Docetic: Jesus walked the earth as a phantom, since it is beneath the gods to actually take on human flesh.

Proto-orthodox: No! Jesus was flesh and blood, even though he was divine.

Adoptionist: Jesus was just a human being of flesh and blood; the divine part came after his birth and left before his death.

Proto-orthodox: No! Jesus was divine both in his birth and in his death, although he was indeed a human being of flesh and blood.

Ebionite: Jesus was just a human being, period.

Proto-orthodox: No! Jesus was both a human being and divine.

Mythicist (unattested): Jesus never even walked the earth.

Proto-orthodox: Well, okay then.

In this period Christians were debating every single aspect of the person of Christ. Had someone stated that he never, ever walked the earth, of course it would have been controversial, and of course the proto-orthodox heresiologists would have condemned the view.

Ben.

spin

Except of course that the notion of "proto-orthodox" is off the wall. Orthodoxy is a political situation. We enforce our views as the one and only correct way and we have orthodoxy. That requires church hierarchy. Before the imposition of a single correct way, the notion of orthodoxy is meaningless.


spin

Toto

The early mythicists might have been indistinguishable from the docetists. We have had that discussion before without resolving the question.

Doug Shaver

My apologies. I thought you were referring to the portion of the TF that most people think Josephus really wrote.

I see no reason to assume that the copyist expected his work to just lie in a library. It was a possibility, of course, but certainly not the only possibility.

Because once the gospels began to circulate, the historicists could use them as evidence for their case, and their opponents had no counterevidence. All they had were the same arguments that skeptics have had throughout history: "There is no evidence that those stories are true." Since they were stories of the sort that most people have always wanted to believe, the skeptics didn't have a chance. Within the Christian community at large, the debate would have been over almost before it started.

jjramsey

I'll address both you and hatsoff here ...

The thing is that you seem to be presuming that someone who coldly fashions the perfect ammunition for a war of words would pay no mind as to how to get the ammunition to the intellectual battlefield.

There's another issue that comes to my mind just now. Documents like those of Josephus would be used in a debate by people quoting them and expecting those on the other side to be able to find the same quote. Either that, or a debater bluffs and hopes the other side doesn't check the sources. If a debater is bluffing, then he can skip the middleman of a copyist and just misquote. If he isn't bluffing, then for a copyist's efforts to be useful, he'd have to be able to affect the copies that the opponents would look up. For a contemporary debate where a non-Christian work is cited, that is especially dicey, because during the era of the debate, the non-Christian works would be copied by pagans as well (or perhaps exclusively so at the time), and the pagan opposition would likely get their copies from pagan copyists. Christian control of copies of pagan works comes much later.

But there is no great reason to buy Doherty's time line.

And why would the opponents limit themselves to skeptical-style arguments? Why not, for example, mock the fleshly aspects of the gospels and insist that they could not possibly be stories befitting a divinity? Why not invent opposing stories of their own? The idea that they would be stunned into silence seems more convenient than realistic.

Roger Pearse

I'm not sure that I'm very interested in the topic of this thread but may I point out the number of could and would words being used (on both sides)? These are indicative of opinion. Is there any value in asserting opinion, and if so, to whom?

I'll ignore the main issue and address this question.

People do bluff, asserting things which they don't actually know as fact, and they do get away with it, even now. The number of websites containing false and unattributed statements of 'fact' about Christian origins -- material that any of us could look up online in the full English text of the works in question -- is very great.

This problem must have been considerably greater in antiquity, when copies of books had to be located, then manually consulted, and when books were individually copied and had no pagination so might contain anything. Likewise there were no reference volumes. Galen complains of forgery of works under his name, and was driven to issue a list of genuine compositions. However he also records with delight overhearing a customer at a bookstall rejecting a book with "That isn't by Galen!" (Sadly few of Galen's works seem to exist in English, including these -- I'm getting this from some websites, so beware).

People also get 'quotes' in good faith from third-parties and repeat them in good faith, so there is no issue of dishonesty here. It's just human nature. No-one can verify everything.

This is so.

But we ought to be aware that original sin means that almost every evil does actually exist, in all periods of history. Forgery did occur in this manner during the Byzantine period, even though the forgers could not be confident that they had altered all copies. (They therefore made efforts to manage this situation by other means, as we will see). Byzantine church councils do include episodes when the debate stopped while a search was made for volumes. At the Council of Florence at the end of the middle ages, it was shown conclusively that some of those on one side had indeed interfered with modern copies of the text in the interest of their 'theological' (really political) position, because older ones were found without the "useful" testimony.

This could get fairly extreme, if a paper that I heard at the last Patristics conference is correct, concerning one Byzantine council. There is evidence suggesting that double forgeries happened, when books which contained a genuine text had the pages at issue replaced with obviously more modern pages containing the same text, as if they were a later addition. Then the forger could claim that his *opponents* were forging the evidence, and so dismiss copies containing what were actually genuine passages, and demonise them while they were dragged away, protesting their innocence. (We don't have the word 'byzantine' in our language for nothing).

But perhaps such involved treacheries and deceits really belong to a later period.

It must be correct that a minority appealing to texts freely available to everyone cannot sensibly hope to interfere with all those copies, unless the text only exists in a few copies.

That said... we don't know how many copies of Josephus Antiquities ever did exist at one time. It was a long and boring work, of interest to few. Are we confident that lots existed? I know that there are suggestions that only one copy of Pausanias ever existed at any one time before the age of printing, for instance.

All this is perhaps irrelevant to many people reading this. What I would suggest is that we can always find a way to suppose that those with whom we disagree could be lying. But isn't this just tedious, as well as bad mannered? Surely we must believe that most people are not engaged in deliberate dishonesty, unless we have definite and very clear evidence to the contrary?

All the best,

Roger Pearse