GakuseiDon

An orthodox Jew believing that another Jew was the Messiah is an "anomaly"??? How does that work? :huh:

Stringbean

I don't know man you tell me? That's exactly the reason Josephus would never have written such a statement to start with. Clearly the Jews expected such a Messiah and Josephus may have expected the same but the Jews did not believe that this christian jesus was the Messiah at least from what I know of it. If jesus had been the Messiah then the Jews when given a choice between a convict and a Messiah they chose to release the convict. What's up with that? Christianity has one major, major fault the way I see it. If it is the only right religion in the world how come everyone else does not buy it? Euseibus clearly at the time knew Josephus writing well and the passage if it existed had been known for hundreds of years by the church. No I think if the passage was an honest to goodness truth the church would have trotted it out and slung it at all who did not believe!

Tommy

Why no just assume there is no later addition and the words are Josephus' own? This would discredit his independence as a source and in any case he wasn't a contemporary. We can agree that around that time there were at least some people who believed Jesus was the Messiah or else there wouldn't have been an early church.

Vorkosigan

The whole thing is obviously a later interpolation. Relying on Layman quoting Vermes and Meiers is folly.

Joe Atwell called attention to the passages following the TF. They have a strange satirical air to them, especially the one about "Paulina" (both concern women married to a Saturninus). In fact the one right after it is about a fake god who reveals himself after three days......

Doherty is a good antidote:

http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp16.htm
"But here, as Zindler points out, Josephus is very clear that this is a digression, for he introduces the account with: “I will now first take notice of the wicked attempt about the temple of Isis, and will then give an account of the Jewish affairs.” At its conclusion he alerts the reader: “I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews of Rome, as I formerly told you I would.” As Zindler says, “No such notice is given to explain his alleged digression into Jesus appearing alive on the third day.”"

As Doherty points, let's assume a less Christian partial TF was present. That gives even greater motive for the writers of the early Christian era to use it. Yet none do. Later writers also seem to be aware of copies of J that have no TF:

• Frank Zindler (op.cit., p.45-48) has called attention to another Christian commentator who, though versed in Josephus’ writings and employing them in his homilies, nevertheless makes no reference to any version of the Testimonium: St. John Chrysostom, who wrote late in the 4th century. In Homily 76, he subscribes to the by now well-established Christian view that Jerusalem was destroyed because of the crucifixion of Jesus. He appeals to Josephus as evidence that the destruction was indeed horrific, something that could only be explained by a deed as monstrous as deicide. Also, he says, there can be no truth to the fantasy that Josephus was actually a Christian believer, “For he was both a Jew, and a determined Jew, very zealous.” Yet there is no discussion of any Josephan testimony to Jesus himself by Chrysostom, and certainly not to the question of what the historian might have had to say about Jesus’ messianic or ‘more than human’ status. Other homilies by Chrysostom contain other appeals to Josephus, but none to the Testimonium. Most striking is Homily 13. Here he says that Josephus imputes the destructive war to the murder of John the Baptist. Nowhere in the extant texts of Josephus is such an imputation to be found, one which also stands in contradiction to statements by Origen and Eusebius that Josephus regarded the destruction of Jerusalem as punishment by God for the murder of James the Just—an allegation, too, which cannot be found in surviving texts. (Josephus actually implies at one point that the destruction of the war was due to the Zealot’s murder of the former High Priest Ananus.)
  
  In addition to Chrysostom, others of his era fail to mention the Testimonium. Steve Mason observes (op.cit., p.57) that “during the century after Eusebius there are five church fathers, including Augustine, who certainly had many occasions to find it useful and who cite passages from Josephus but not this one.” Augustine lived and worked in North Africa, while Eusebius and Jerome (who do refer to it) were in the Levant, so the interpolation may not have worked its way to more western areas until later in the 5th century.
  
  Such things, along with the situation in other writers to be noted shortly, illustrates the diversity of emendation which various Christian scribes were performing on Josephus in a variety of quarters, most of them seemingly not cognizant of the contradictory or missing material in other copies being used throughout the Christian world. Indeed, that situation apparently continued for centuries. Zindler makes a good case (p.48-50) for concluding that the 9th century Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, in compiling his Library (a review of several hundred ancient books, including treatises on the works of Josephus) apparently possessed a copy of Josephus which contained no Testimonium, nor even those interpolations we conclude were introduced to make Josephus say that the destruction of Jerusalem was due to the death of James the Just, or of John the Baptist. As Zindler says,
  
  “Since Photius was highly motivated to report ancient attestations to the beginnings of Christianity, his silence here argues strongly that neither the Testimonium nor any variant thereof was present in the manuscript he read. This also argues against the notion that the Testimonium was created to supplant an originally hostile comment in the authentic text of Josephus. Had a negative notice of a false messiah been present in the text read by Photius, it is inconceivable he could have restrained himself from comment thereon.”
  
  Photius does discuss the Antiquities 18 passage on John the Baptist. To think that he would do so yet pass up one about Christ himself—no matter what its nature—is, as Zindler says, quite inconceivable. Photius at a number of points also seems to quote marginal notes from his copy of Josephus, giving evidence of the ease with which such things could have found their way into the original text and given rise to debates about what was authentic to Josephus’ own writings. And before leaving Zindler on Photius, we can note a feature that will figure in our discussion of the other Josephan reference to Jesus. The reading in Photius’ copy of that allegedly indisputable phrase in Antiquities 20, “the brother of Jesus, called Christ, whose name was James,” apparently read simply, “James, the brother of the Lord.”

You can be sure that if they possessed an original text with the partial fantasy TF, they would have mentioned it.

Earl also observes:

• Ancient Christians must have been painfully aware of the void in Jewish War, for although no corresponding passage (that we know of) was interpolated into the work to remedy the omission, we do have a few manuscripts of Jewish War in which the Testimonium itself, from the Antiquities, was inserted, either at the beginning or the end of the manuscript, or in one case at the end of Book II. We can also note that Jewish War contained no paragraph on John the Baptist such as appears in Antiquities 18, and this too was similarly inserted in some manuscripts. (There will be a word to say later about whether the Baptist passage in Antiquities might be an interpolation as well, with Josephus saying nothing about that figure.)

The TF floated into these texts as a bloc. And not the partial fantasy TF, either.

Vorkosigan

mountainman

Precisely. Note that this is a two-edged sword.

Who were the people really interested in establishing some authentic history for their "nation of Christians" and when did they really swing into action before the 4th century?

Toto

You are assuming that the forger, or Eusebius, intended to deceive his readers by deliberately adopting Josephan language. I don't think this is the case. I suspect any Josephan language was just the result of having read Josephus, and remembering the words.

After all, Eusebius included some dubious documents - correspondence between Jesus and King Agbar, e.g - which later scholars in the Renaissance were easily able to identify as forgeries.

mountainman

A resurrection is a resurrection of something already dead. Do these serious, unbiased scholars acknowledge the validity of the consensus of earlier scholarship which has called the TF a common forgery? NO. These details are OMITTED. How convenient! Who are these people trying to fool with their haphazard citations to consensus of scholarship?

The modern scholars who have resurrected a partial TF refuse to entertain any dialogue concerning the prior scholarship. They start with the Feldman Review as if Feldman holds some sort of intellectual priority - when it does not. These actions are identical to the actions of defence attorneys who are being paid to take the heat off the fact that the TF was in the past considered by scholarship to be a common forgery.

See Making fruit salad of the Testimonium Flavianum

Ted the "Partial TF" argument appears to runs like this.

The TF may not be an apple (a genuine juicy testimony)
but it certainly not a lemon (a common sour forgery) -- This bit is often omitted from treatments such as Price's, but not Kirby's
because is is in fact something else which we will call an orange (with bits of partial apple, mixed with bits of partial lemon).

spin

Not a response.

Not dealing with the discourse markers. The most important marker you missed was here:

[T2]"About the same time another outrage threw the Jews into an uproar"[/T2]

The Jesus insertion has nothing to do with the Jewish uproar Josephus was talking about before or after it. It's a fish out of water.

Oh, this one requires thought before you can understand. Here's a task. Find one definitive reference to αδελφος as biological brother in the works of Paul. If you can't find one, you're talking rot. There are less than 80 examples, TedM, and aver 70 are guaranteed "fellow believer" type usage. Paul avoids kin relations throughout his letters, only succumbing through necessity and then marking them with "according to the flesh". So, find just one, before you continue.

If you take out the bits you don't like then the result is arbitrary and an analysis of it will reflect your decisions, not that of the material.

I guess that's a start.

And my latest is: don't be a hypocrite.

And don't just pick out what you don't like.

You don't eat bread you've dropped on the floor no matter how many flyspecks you pick out of it. You don't drink water that someone has pissed in no matter whether most of it was drained off or not. You're not safe from cancer despite the fact that the surgeon has removed all that s/he could see.

You analogy is wrong. You can point to a radiator. It is not an arbitrary decision to isolate a fault there. It is purely arbitrary to admit that a text has been tampered with and then cut out the obvious bits proclaiming that the rest must be good. It is one thing to isolate bits that are clearly not a part of the original. But there can still be other parts that slip through because they don't look so obvious. Some flyspecks aren't black and blend in on the bread

You will go away unrepentantly convinced that one can be this arbitrary, while being correct. And I'll go away unrepentantly knowing that you too frequently talk through your hat.

TedM

I don't understand. He had his the earlier TF that didn't have Josephan language, right? So, there was no need to adopt other words to replace what was in the earlier TF. Why would the only two changes be words that Eusebius never used in his own works but 'remembered' from somewhere else in Josephus? That doesn't make much sense.

For newcomers, I'm trying to understand what seems to me to be a strong argument for Eusebian interpolation, that is not begin presented as a strong argument. Kirby doesn't even mention it in his article. Nor Price. And Olsen downplays it. Why isn't it being trumpeted for interpolation instead?

GakuseiDon

Strange then, that Photius appears to be aware of Eusebius's writings, but still didn't mention the TF. Does this suggest that he had a copy of Eusebius that DIDN'T contain the TF? Because otherwise, if the logic above is correct, Photius should have mentioned it.

Photius writes:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ph...ibliotheca.htm

On the other hand the divine Ignatius and Clement, the author of the Stromateis, and Eusebius Pamphilus and Theodoret of Cyr condemn the heresy of the Nicolaitans but deny that Nocholas was connected with it. Hippolytus and Irenaeus claim that the Letter to the Hebrews is not by Paul 26, but Clement and Eusebius and a numerous company of the other fathers count this letter among the others and say that Clement named above translated it from Hebrew.

So why did Photius not refer to the TF?