maryhelena

Thanks for the chart - it always seems to make things much simpler when things are set out in order! So, Origen has added a few words here and there. Which would simply show that he felt free to make his own use of the sources at his disposal; interpreting what others have put into written words is a major scholarly endeavor to this day! Ones choice of words is conditioned by ones knowledge of language and ones ability to translate ones thoughts to the most appropriate language. I do find it incredible that a lot of these arguments revolve around what word choices have been used by an author...To imagine that questions regarding the assumption of a historical JC are going to be settled by written words - it's mind-blowing....

So, Josephus, or whoever is writing under that name, has written: "... and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James...". Now, as has been done repeatedly on this forum, and now once again, these words can be debated until kingdom come. The JC historicists say these words are proof of a historical JC. Some ahistoricists/mythicists are saying 'interpolation'. The interpolation argument of some ahistoricists/mythicists is very weak. The debate is going the way of the JC historicists - these words, as best as can be ascertained, were written by the Josephan writer.

However, since the debate over words cannot establish historicity for the gospel JC - what do these Josephan words relate to? What is Josephus doing with this story about a James and a Jesus? And a story it is - until such time as historicity can be established for the James and Jesus figures.

The Josephan writer has set his story around 63 c.e. OK - here is what I think the Josephan writer is doing with his story.

Antigonus, the last King and High Priest of the Jews, bound to a stake/cross, flogged and slain in 37 b.c. Cassius Dio.	100 year Anniversary of the killing of Antigonus, 63 c.e.
High Priests, 37/36 b.c, appointed by Herod the Great	High Priests, 62/63 c.e, appointed by Agrippa II
Ananelus 37/36 b.c. (removed)	Joseph Cabi ben Simon, (removed)
High Priest, Aristobulus III drowned (plot of Herod the Great) brother of Mariamne I. (37/36 b.c.)	Ananus ben Ananus, (removed) James stoned, brother of Jesus, called Christ
Ananelus (restored) 36-30 b.c.	Jesus, son of Damneus, made High Priest.

Yes, lots of questions of course! Josephus re-running the historical tape. New time slot with a James and a Jesus - figures whose historicity cannot be established. Methinks, rather than debating words - it is historical 'patterns' that should be considered when trying to fathom out what Josephus, a prophetic historian re modern scholarly research, is endeavoring to communicate - communicating under the very nose of Rome.

(as a matter of interest, a similar pattern can be found with the Josephan story of John the Baptist, Herod Antipas and Aretas - and Machaerus. 100 years since Pompey's siege of Jerusalem in 63 b.c. when Antigonus was taken prisoner to Rome.)

The ahistoricists/mythicst should be upping their game instead of endlessly playing a loosing game with Josephus. Josephus is not supporting a historical gospel JC. (of whatever variant).
------------------
As for the TF - I'm beginning to think any 'interpolation' there was the work of Josephus - probably a later addition to Antiquities, an update of sorts....but that is a subject for another thread at another time...

Toto

Who wrote the gospels? a non-Christian? If you can't even admit this simple basic point, it doesn't lend any support to the rest of your argument.

You don't know that this never happened.

spin

Your bitching thread was just what one comes to expect from you. A text wall that few would feel any stimulus to read.

It is only through a slavishly overliteral reading that you can posit that I'm applying markedness to an author rather than to linguistic features in a language corpus. The biggest searchable body of Greek with examples of such introduction as that in AJ 20.200 I have just happens to be the Greek of Josephus (and to a far lesser degree the nt Greek). As to your other claims above, just image the ridicule.

Shaye Cohen (people frequently misspell the name) clearly indicates that he has a notion of syntactic structure that can distinguish a figure already introduced. That he can be disappointed ("Anipater the father of Herod is described as if a new character...") merely shows that the marked syntax is not obligatory. The quote actually goes against your claim. What Cohen should have remembered is a working principle explained by Runge in his doctoral dissertation ("A Discourse-Functional Description of Participant Reference in Biblical Hebrew Narrative", U. Stellenbosch, 2007), "Usage of a marked form explicitly indicates the presence of a particular feature. Use of the unmarked form does not specify whether the feature is present or not. It may or may not be present; the form is unmarked".

You could repeat them, if they are more use than Cohen.

As unhelpful as it was the first time. This is smoke. You need evidence for your claim that the syntax in 20.200 is somehow ordinary, not just generic observations that Josephus was sloppy and miscopied or omitted stuff. In fact, you've shown that it is anything but ordinary.

The list is longer than those two (text wall & bait and switch).

You could and I'd say thanks for not doing so... except for the fact that what you are doing is wasting your time not making a point. While I said "[i]t is common to lead with the old information". It is not obligatory. You are the one who is trying to prescribe linguistics rather than describe it. You're being more a misguided grammarian rather than a linguist. So release the trigger and bandage your foot.

If you had something relevant to go on about, but you are just being histrionic and sadly I have no drama royalty smiley for you.

Jeez, every single case of "his son X' should stop this dramatic recitation. That "his" is a placeholder for a recently mentioned father.



Perhaps you should read what Shaye Cohen said again. It didn't sink in the first few times.

You're certainly spitting bile and making things up as you go. Too bad this is all filler.

"It's a cigar, Monica."

For a while it seemed that you thought a patronymic was not an identification. I'm glad you got hold of yourself. But I wish you'd learn the art of editing for bevity and relevance.

I'm not trying to talk down to my reading audience. I'm trying to make things clear to them, many with no knowledge of Greek. It's an art you should learn, as witnessed by the fact that many of those reading your other waste of time thread could not understand your whinging about markedness.

While "almost every order of NP constituents is possible" there are clearly preferred orders, otherwise Cohen's expectations couldn't be disappointed, when preferred orders are not evinced.

I'm working on the notion that the head word is the one that everything else depends upon and qualifies. From "the brother of Jesus called christ James by name" we remove all the identifying material and end up with James. From 'the son of Nabateius by the name, called from ill-fortune, Keagiras, which signifies "lame"' we get Keagiras, a name which could simply replace all the rest and maintain a coherent sentence. Everything else is adjunct to the person. If no name were supplied, we would be dealing with the stated noun that refers to the person, "the son", "the brother", "the merchant", "the king" or whatever. (Let's imagine that you've had your self-righteous rant off-screen.)

If you'd waited, you'd have found that it was.

Isn't that the issue? We know why the others are.

Don't you love it when you can crap on so vacuously, when, if you'd waited till you'd read what you were trying to deal with, you wouldn't be shooting off?

Wot?

He apparently thought the fact that he was called--at least in its Greek equivalent--"Keagiras" was worthy of explanation.

Apparently because he felt it necessary to locate the name closer to the end of the phrase.

I hope the color was useful. But you conclusion that 'somehow this isn't "marked"' is incorrect. And you indicate despite yourself that you believe that it is "marked".

N/A
Yes, we got that from Josephus. It's good that you noticed. He's giving colorful information about the person he is dealing with.

Already answered in the post you're responding to.

This is quite enjoyable to watch this perverseness. You were just crapping on senselessly, assuming I thought it wasn't marked while hinting it was, and now you learn that I say it is marked, so you change your tune.

Perhaps you didn't register what I said above, but will repeat here:

So, LegionOnomaMoi has managed to find an example of another reason for marked syntax

Get that? It is marked! And I've explained the necessity.

You know basically what the term means and you've let it slip.

If you disregard the word "normally". What this example appears to be is a normal structure of an introduction without descriptor ("a certain boy named Jesus") with "Tebuthi" thrown in as an afterthought.

You can wrongly call them exceptions. You've merely supplied examples of marked syntax that hadn't been considered, those that feature the use of inclusion.

Well, other than your betrayal of the fact that you do have an understanding of the term which you have contrasted with mine, though unsuccessfully, because you were too eager to misunderstand. And the indication that Cohen understands a marking for information already introduced, though is disappointed in his reading of Josephus regarding that marking.

Cute.

aa5874

Again we see simple basic logical deductions outside the reach of LegionOnomaMoi.

If a Christian fraudster interpolated Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 it is expected that the fraudster would have employed the writing style of Josephus to CONCEAL the forgery.

This is most basic.

Forgeries are Products of Deception.

Now, who would claim someone was called Christ when Josephus had ALREADY claimed VESPASIAN was the Messianic ruler predicted in Hebrew Scripture in an EARLIER writing called "Wars of the Jews".

This EXTREMELY significant.

Josephus himself FOUGHT against the Romans EXPECTING Messianic rulers at c 70 CE.

After the DEAFEAT of the Jews, Josephus was taken captive and he DECLARED, like a prophet, that Vespasian is the Messianic ruler.

Wars of the Jews 6.5.4 It is hardly likely that Josephus would have written another later book and claimed some UNKNOWN character called Jesus was Christ.

Both Suetonius and Tacitus did CORROBORATE the claim of Josephus that Vespasian was INDEED the PREDICTED Messianic ruler of Hebrew Scripture and NEVER EVER mentioned Jesus.

Suetonius' Life of Vespasian Suetonius' Life of Vespasian It is CLEAR that it is highly unlikely that Josephus would have written that Jesus was called Christ when Suetonius WROTE AFTER Antiquities of the Jews and Mentioned Josephus by NAME and that Josephus PREDICTED Vespasian was the prophesied Messianic ruler of Hebrew Scripture.

Based on the Abundance of evidence it was most likely a Christian Fraudster that interpolated Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 using his writing style.

A Christian would claim Jesus was Christ.

Josephus claimed Vespasian was the Messianic ruler and it is Corroborated by Suetonius and Tacitus.

Tacitus' Histories V It was a Christian Fraudster that Interpolated Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 and wrote Jesus was called Christ since there was NO prediction at all in Hebrew Scripture of such a character at any time in the history of the Jews.

This is SO basic.

Let us do History.

LegionOnomaMoi

??? So now you are back tracking. All those claims about "we have to find it in Josephus" actually meant "Josephus is the biggest searchable body of Greek etc." Of course, that's complete bullshit, as Josephus was relying heavily on hellenistic historiography in general, and these types of introductions occur all the time in such works.

So, if now you're making a claim about Greek, and not Josephus, does that mean that this:no longer holds true?

Where?

No, markedness shows that unmarked syntax is not obligatory. That's the whole fucking theory.

That's what YOU should have remembered (and had you followed his citations, you would have discovered construction grammar). The entire point behind his dissertation is simply that if one can identify "marked" forms of participant reference vs. "unmarked", then one can determine that the "marked" forms convey more semantic meaning. That's it. Now, first of all, your google search hit is on biblical hebrew, not greek. So we're still relying on your analysis of "marked" word order here, which contradicts numerous analyses of actual greek. And as long as you want to use functional analyses, why ignore "Genitive word order in Ancient Greek: A functional analysis of word order freedom in the noun phrase"? According to Viti's analysis, after Homer, preposed genitive kinship relations are more frequent. In other words, if we look at how genitive kinship in greek is typically expressed, AJ 20.200 is unmarked. So sad for you.


And I provided it. For Greek. With Bakker's study on the noun phrase, with Viti's study cited above, etc. What you have failed to do is show that it is "somehow" not ordinary. You claimed it was, with your little rule about fame and introductions. Only Josephus doesn't seem to care whether or not the person was introduced before or the relative is famous. When he uses a patronymic, he tends to put the son first regardless. You have failed to show there is any pattern to Josephus' method of "participant reference" such that we should conclude anything about the word order of AJ 20.200.


,
.

Only it isn't "common" in Josephus. What is "common" when he uses patronymics is "son first." Period.

This is getting really funny. You are accusing me of a prescriptive approach when I'm the one saying that the word order is not irregular?

Spin: "AJ 20.200 is "marked". The word order is irregular. We should expect something different.
Me: "Word order in greek is quite flexible, and josephus isn't regular when it comes to referring to people in general."
Spin: "You are trying to prescribe linguistics!"





So this is what we'll get as the basis of your analysis of clausal constituents? "Look, I can bracket things with colors!" Nothing at all from a google search you could find to support how you bracket constituents in Greek?

That would only be true if Shaye Cohen (I do owe you for that. I've been misspelling his name for years) used "word order" as the basis for his note that Josephus frequently "introduces" people he has introduced before. Only he doesn't. He relies on the fact that they are identified as if we had no idea who they are. This is done lexically. For example: "The uneven method of introducing and re-introducing characters and places is particularly conspicuous in V. Cestius Gallus, the governer of Syria, is mentioned first in V 23, but his title does not appear until V 30." I don't see anything about word order. Do you?


Then your notion is faulty. Because analyses of greek word order demonstrate that preposed reference modifiers are more typical. This includes genitive kinship relations. Thus AJ 20.200 is "unmarked" if one wishes to use that particular thoery.


Only it doesn't. Make up your mind. Do you want to apply structuralist/transformationalist "analysis" (i.e., your colorful word bracketing), or not? Because this talk of "simply replace" and so forth is formalist, not functionalist. The simple fact is that in both cases, all the identifying information comes first. The only thing that follows the name is what it means.


How any of this matters...


No, we don't. We have your bogus claim about famous people and previously mentioned people, the fact that you conflate patronymics with other forms/methods of identifying, and your crap analysis of the "structure" of AJ 20.200 and the other examples, in which you bracket things according to a linguistic theory you apparently invented.


So, as long as you can come up with an ad hoc explanation for your "marked" order we're good? Ok. Concerning AJ 20.200: Josephus apparently thought that the fact that James was the brother of Jesus called christ was worth mentioning first.

More ad hoc. Again, concerning AJ 20.200: Apparently he felt it necessary to locate the name closer to the end of the phrase.

You see, that's the problem with applying a theory (markedness) you don't really understand. Because while actual functional linguists are using it to explain why we find the structures we do (i.e., find a reason Josephus uses the word order he does in 20.200), you were doing just the opposite: it's "marked" and therefore questionable. Only in other cases does markedness magically become a descriptive approach, where ad hoc explanations serve to explain whatever you want.



Actually, I'm still waiting for anything resembling a coherent approach to Josephus, Greek, or language. Your colorful "bracketing" is plainly transformationalist, but you refer to a functionalist dissertation (of biblical hebrew) to defend your markedness use (only he doesn't follow your use).

"NECESSITY"? Where? You made up a rule, and then made up ad hoc explanations for exceptions. That's all you've done. No use of analyses of the Greek language with respect to either word order or reference modifiers (the best you could come up with was a dissertation on biblical hebrew? really?). Just "here's my rule and if you find exceptions, I'll be more than happy to figure out and explanation I can apply. Unless it's 20.200. Because that particular instance of marked word order is so marked that I can't dream up an explanation out of thin air like I can do with every other exception to my invented rule."

I don't "basically" know. I know exactly what it means. I know how it is has evolved in basically two opposite traditions and branched out. In our first exchange on linguistics I cited monographs which used the term. The problem isn't that I dont' know what it means. It's that I do, and thus I know your application is bullshit. You are using only Josephus to explain why AJ 20.200 is "marked" and then going from there to say that this "markedness" is why we should suspect interpolation. By contrast, what functional linguists do (as detailed in the dissertation you referred to) is use markedness to explain what the author intends by using the "marked" form. In other words, if you really wanted to use markedness here, you'd be doing what you did (well, sort of; an actual linguistic analysis wouldn't be as ad hoc), which is to use the "marked" structure to explain what the author intends to convey by using it. Not claiming its "marked" and thus should be considered suspect. That flies in the face of the entire functionalist program.

More ad hoc. It's normal, but it's not because we have a preposed genitive. Which is actually normal, but not according to your made up rule, so you've made up a reason to go along with it.

So, having invented what structures are "marked", and why, you then explain the reason for markedness behind every other structure that is "marked". Except AJ 20.200. There ad hoc explanations fail you.

LegionOnomaMoi

You asked about statistics:
In order to show anything with a statistical model, you need a sample. In order for the model to be meaningful, it has to be of a certain size. If I take every use of the phrase "called christian" we have in every texts, regardless of who wrote it, the sample size is still too small to show anything about usage. Just looking at the few examples we have that are explicitly written by Christians, we have on in Matthew used pragmatically at the end of his genealogy, two other examples in which Pilate uses the phrase, a place in John where it translates messiah, and Justin's use of it to explain to outsider's what Jesus is called. So we have only two examples of the type you refer to, and only two other explicit examples. That's insufficient to conclude anything meaningful using any statistical model.
No, I can't be certain. But I can be certain about how probable it is. That's what statistics are for. Given the population of changes to references to Jesus we do have, we have more than enough samples to reconstruct the distribution of the entire population.

Toto

Outside of this one reference in Josephus, 100% of the writers who used the phrase "called Christ" were Christian. (You know that the words of Pilate in the gospels are not a transcript, but are the literary product of a Christian, right?) The rest is obfuscation.

aa5874

It is laughable that LegionOnomaMoi simply does NOT understand what a forgery is.

If the passage in Antiquities 20.9.1 was a forgery it will most likely be similar to the writing style of Josephus NOT, NOT the style of the Fraudster.

It is imperative that the interpolator MASKS his own writing style and uses the style of the author which he manipulates to AVOID detection.

This is basic.

Now, Up to the mid 2nd century, it is stated by Justin Martyr in "Dialogue with Trypho" that Jews did NOT claim that Christ had already come.

Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho" is EVIDENCE that ALL mention that Jesus was called Christ in Antiquities of the Jews were BLATANT forgeries.

Dialogue With Trypho CXUp to the mid 2nd century, Justin Martyr was NOT aware of any Jewish claim that Christ had already come or had already been identified.

It is ALL over. Let us do history. There is NO history of Jesus who was called Christ.

Philo, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Justin Martyr corroborate that AJ 20.9.1 MUST BE or Most likely is a FORGERY

LegionOnomaMoi

It isn't, actually. The relevant question here is whether or not we have reason (whatever it may be: syntactic, pragmatic, etc.) to think that the line in question was added or altered. Unfortunately, almost all that was written during the period of interest is lost. This is especially true of anti-christian sentiment, which is at least somewhat preserved in refutations of it.

However, what we do have are the following:

1) A large number of texts (not manuscripts; here I'm only counting a document once, e.g., "Matthew" not all the copies of Matthew) written by Christians

2) Copies of a large number of these texts, which are filled with alterations, interpolations, etc.

3) A large number of fragments, uncovered by archaeologists.

Josephus refers to Jesus as "called Christ" in all our (limited) manuscripts. If we postulate that a Christian scribe inserted this, then we not only need some evidence as to why, but also some indication of how likely this is. Spin's little thesis is that Origen came up with the phrase "called Christ" after mixing up Hegesippus' "Brother of the Lord" with Josephus. The problem is that the only time Origen uses this phrase is in connection with Josephus. How likely is it that Origen would have used the phrase when borrowing from Hegesippus, when Hegesippus did not? Well, immediately after using this construction in Contra Celsum, Origen goes on to call James "the brother of the Lord" and explain the brotherhood at some length. He also refers to James elsewhere, yet never with this expression EXCEPT when referring to Josephus. So why, if his inspiration was Hegesippus, did he not use Hegesippus' wording, rather than such an obscure method of referring to Jesus that the one "christian" usage in Matthew 1:16 is altered in quotations and manuscripts so that it no longer reads this?

I've already looked at the number of times that Christians used other terms, as well as the number of scribal alterations. But after your last post, a thought occurred to me and I tried something else. We have, thanks to years and years of digging, edicts, proclamations, trial documents, letters, inscriptions, etc., from the first century to the 7th (or at least that's when I stopped searching). So I examined the following:

1) My copies of New Document Illustrating Christianity Vols 1, 2, 4,5,6,7,8 & 9. (I don't own volume 3)

2) The LOEB "Select Papyri" both Public Documents (Vol. 2) and Private Affairs (Vol. 1)

3) Finally, just to be on the safe side, I searched Papyri.info (which combines papyri data from several sources).

The results of these efforts were as follows:

1) I am so sick of seeing the words "Christ Jesus" in Greek or "Our lord and Savior Christ Jesus" or any similar combination that I am pretty sure I have conditioned myself (in the classical behavioral sense) to respond to Christian titles like a lab rat is to sounds which come with electrical shocks.

2) In the hundreds and hundreds of various references to Jesus, from a legal agreement in 602 CE with cloth dyers (which begins en onomati tou kuriou kai despotou Iesou Christou tou theou kai soteros humon/"in the name of our lord and master Jesus Christ God and Savior") to various letters from the first century onwards, there are an enormous number of references to Jesus. Not a single one has "called Christ". Not one. Despite all different sorts of contexts, document types, etc., this construction is completely absent.

So, given the utter lack of its use among christians in private and public documents, the almost complete and utter lack of its use in more important texts, and the complete lack of scribal alterations which add this word (and the known existence of those which alter the construction in Matthew), which is more likely:
1) Origen decided he was going to use Matthew's phrasing (and, coincidently, only in the context of referring to Josephus), and christian scribes, the same christian scribes who were responsible not only for transmitting our other manuscripts (the NT, the "church fathers", classical texts, etc.), but also for writing many of the papyri we have (as they were hired for such purposes) added this into the text based on Origen's use, and no other scribe bothered to just scratch it out to make it more "christian".

2) Josephus had the phrase in there to begin with, and Origen's odd use of this extraordinarily rare construction reflects Josephus', just like Eusebius' does (and Hegesippus does not).

thief of fire

Where is the reference please?
Where specifically does he indicate that?