PhilosopherJay

Hi Toto,

Steve Mason's observation is quite acute. We simply cannot know what kind of changes Eusebius made to the paragraph, if there was an original paragraph there. Did he rewrite one sentence, two, three, every one? Did he add a word, two words, three words, or 100 words. Did he erase one word, two words, 100 words. If we had Josephus' original we could easily see, but as things stand now, it is most problematic.

An argument for rewriting can be made by the fact that we have other text that Eusebius wrote where we do see changes he made. There is just no way to know how much rewriting was done for this particular passage.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

spin

For chrissake, the English publishers were obviously repurposing the text with the name change. Can't you get past such literalist gagging?

I doubt if you could have come up with a sillier analogy, while maintaining the appearance of seriousness.

LegionOnomaMoi

Perhaps you believe this because, given your familiarity with secondary sources (or lack thereof) you haven't looked at enough textbooks similar to the one in question to judge. Not that there aren't actual articles or books intended as serious scholarship which are just as flawed, but pointing out that a textbook which contains summaries of arguments others have made in greater detail elsewhere and which is meant to more or less reflect the academic consensus of the issues considered (or give descriptions of common views within academia in a concise manner) is a waste of time. It's critiquing a work for not doing something it was never intended to. Textbooks, whether on quantum mechanics or Greek philosophy, are not intended to be understood as presenting arguments so much as summarizing them. I used cosmology and the big bang because everbody knows at least a bit about the "big bang" model (usually some garbled version) and compared to something like evolutionary theory it not a charged topic. If you don't like that particular analogy, pick any topic you wish for which a large number of various collections of research are broken down into smaller, simpler forms in a textbook. The same applies.

Theißen & Merz do not give an argument; they summarize many.

spin

While I can't go along with the "carefully constructed whole", it is plain that the TF doesn't fit in its present location. As I pointed out here, in the passage that follows the TF
The Greek for "another" usually implies a dualistic system, one or the other, the right hand or the left, one of two, etc. The first calamity that threw the Jews into an uproar, as I indicated here is found in AJ 18.55-62 (18.3.1-2), the second starting with the indicated clause. This leaves the TF out not being a calamity which caused the Jews to go into disarray, nor does it make sense in its location between the first and second calamities.

This is what I commented on in the same post,

I analysed it graphically previously, when talking of a piece of buttered bread which has fallen on the flyspecked floor. You can pick it up and clean off all the fly specks. Would you eat it? Fly specks can easily go unperceived.

The ugly fact is that it can't be done. Given that Feldman and others do specifically use "aforementioned", you have to find a secondary souce that contradicts it even just to quibble the issue. Otherwise, it would be deemed new work and not admissible.

Well, no. It doesn't change much, but the Arabic is relying on a source which is probably Syriac. Here's a table I prepared on four versions of the TF:

[T2]
.|
Agapius|
TF = Eus. E.H.1.11.7b-8|
Jerome (On Famous Men, 13)|
Michael Chronicle||
1|
At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus.|
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man,|
At the same time there was Jesus, a wise man,|
In these times there was a wise man named Jesus,||
2|
-|
if indeed one ought to call him a man,|
if indeed it is proper to say that he was a man;|
if it is fitting for us to call him a man.||
3|
His conduct was good,|
for he was a doer of wonderful works,|
for he was an accomplisher of marvelous works|
For he was a worker of glorious deeds||
4|
and (he) was known to be virtuous.|
a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.|
and a teacher of those who freely receive true things;|
and a teacher of truth.||
5|
And many people from the Jews and other nations became his disciples.|
He won over many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles.|
he also had very many followers, as many from the Jews as from the gentiles,|
Many from among the Jews and the nations became his disciples.||
6|
-|
He was the Messiah;|
and he was believed to be Christ.|
He was thought to be the messiah,||
7|
Pilate|
When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us,|
When by the envy of our principal ones Pilate|
but not according to the testimony of the principal men of our nation. Because of this, Pilate||
8|
condemned him to be crucified and die.|
had condemned him to the cross,|
had affixed him to a cross,|
condemned him to the cross and he died.||
9|
But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship.|
those that loved him at the first did not forsake him,|
those who had first loved him nevertheless persevered;|
For those who had loved him did not cease to love him.||
10|
They reported that he had appeared to them three days after the crucifixion, and that he was alive;|
for he appeared to them alive again the third day,|
for he appeared to them on the third day living;|
He appeared to them alive after three days.||
11|
accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah|
-|
-|
-||
12|
concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.|
as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him;|
many things, both these and other marvelous things, are in the songs of the prophets who made predictions about him.|
For the prophets of God had spoken with regard to him of such marvelous things.||
13|
-|
and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.|
Even until today the race of Christians, having obtained the word from him, has not failed.|
And the people of the Christians, named after him, has not disappeared till this day.
[/T2]
You can see from the red indications that the Arabic (Agapius) and the Syrian (Michael) have similarities, not found in the other sources, which point to a common source. However the green sections show that the version that Michael used was quite similar to that of Eusebius and Jerome, leaving the differences seen in Agapius as probably reflections of his own editorial intervention. All the securely christianizing materials seen in the TF are found in Michael (and thus deliberately omitted by Agapius), with the one exception that the claim that Jesus was the messiah is mitigated in all but Eusebius. There is no way to decide whether the simple form seen in Eusebius ("he was the christ") is original or not.

In another post in the same tread as the post of mine I refer to above, I note:

spin

Do you know how selection and presentation of material works to make an argument? The text referred to is not a presentation of scientific data. Your analogy is flawed.

LegionOnomaMoi

Unless the English edition continues on a very different note, the quote above and the rest make it clear that the work is designed to introduce students to the various topics, present them with summaries, and with references. The authors even state they don't intend the work to reflect their views. This is true of textbooks in general. They are designed to do exactly what is described in your quote. That does not meant that they are adequate guides as to how scholars arrive at consensus views. And this book is not intended to do so. It is intended to summarize consensus views (if they exist) along with other major views and the basic arguments and/or methods behind them.

Notice that in their discussion of the consensus view they did not detail the actual processes involved in arriving at a consensus. They simply gave the skeleton argument and provided a list of references for more information. It is such lists, far more than anything they right, which become the "anatomy of a consensus." When one exists, it is because there exists enough scholarship to support it and not enough dissent (I choose this wording deliberately to avoid the issue of whether or not it exists because it is most likely correct or because of socio-cultural reasons). If you wish to study the "anatomy" of the scholarship on the TF, then the best thing would be to look at the actual scholarship. You may end up with the same conclusion, but at least you won't have taken a textbook and used it as a model for the flaws of the consensus view. Textbooks are pretty good at informing you what the consensus view is, and briefly noting why.



My apologies. A typo due to a change in thought. We "would have virtually no..."

I wasn't creating a dichotomy so much as asserting that you were more or less presenting a strawman argument. Let's use an example. Think of someone you know well who tends to use certain words and constructions. For example, some people use "people" instead of "one" or "you" or "people" or other ways of refering to everyone and anyone ("people should be kinder to animals"="one should be kinder to animals"). A friend of my recently used the word cacophony, something I hadn't heard in ages, but apparently he uses it somewhat frequently. I use "lest" more than most. And so on.

Now imgaine that this person you know (whom like everyonem has certain terms or constructions or syntax or what have you which are, if not unique to them, particular to them) writes a number of blogs. One day their account is hacked, and you see that the blog says things you know your friend would never say. Yet here and there you find some of those phrases or terms which are particular to your friend. You also recognize that the blog is certainly about something your friend might write about, but that in several places what is written is clearly not something your friend would say.

It could be that the hacker created the whole post. However, none of the pieces of the post which contain information your friend would not have agreed with resemble your friends style or unique use of language. It seems as if the hacker has altered something which was originally written, and every altered place contains none of your friend's unique use of language.

The Josephan passage is similar. It isn't that we can determine what is or isn't from Josephus based on Josephan style. Too much of what Josephus writes in any given passage will not be particular to him. The "revisionist" version is not created by cutting out everything which does not fit his style, as this would leave only words or phrases.

We suspect tampering because the passage is so clearly christian in different places. To suspect that any would-be key signatures of Josephan style are all of a sudden the result of an imitator is to imagine something of a paradox: A heavy handed interpolater who can, just in a few places, pick up idiosyncrasies of Josephan lexical usage.

LegionOnomaMoi

They state explicitly that they are not making an argument. They also explicitly state that their book was "stark von didaktischen Überlegungen bestimmt." In fact, their forward reads like (suprise suprise) most textbooks, and the fact that you think scientific textbooks are somehow different simply means that you haven't read many (if any) in what must be some time. The exception to the presentation of material isn't the sciences but mathematics (although even here we can find textbooks which are fairly similar). Having both read and taught from various textbooks in both the sciences (with respect to teaching: neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, etc.) and humanities (here I have taught little apart from high school textbooks and classics), I find the layout and nature quite similar.

You claim there is a difference (based on what I'm sure is an intimate knowledge with these secondary sources you don't usually read and the sciences), but then go on to make some remark about "the presentation of scientific data." Do you have any idea how little of this is in scientific textbooks? The point is to get across the ideas and theories, not the data which support them. Nor are they attempts to in any depth with these theories or do much justice to minority views.

You can continue to rant and rave about my anology, but before you do, some questions:
1) have you read this book?
2) What are some recent textbooks from the sciences you've read upon which you base your opinion of the inadequacy of my evaluation of textbooks in general including those concerning the sciences?

Toto

Scientific textbooks are off topic here. Please confine the discussion to arguments for interpolation or partial interpolation in Josephus.

LegionOnomaMoi

Forgive me for saying so (especially if wrong), but it seems from the thread title and the response of the OP to a post I wrote earlier that the thread isn't, strictly speaking, about the arguments for interpolation or alternative theories. For example:
Scientific textbooks aside, if the purpose of the thread is really to discuss the metaphorical "anatomy of a consensus", the applicability of the book in question to the purposes for which it is used in the thread would seem to me to be relevant. Moreover, confining comments to a discussion about the TF and arguments for or against seems to miss a central point of the thread: the nature of the scholarly consensus as reflected (according to the OP) in the textbook.

Mandelbrot

A scholar can't give any validity to the claim that the TF was original in any form. A hack however can either based on wishful thinking or an extreme perversion of the context of the entire chapter in Josephus.