Duke Leto

You're not getting it Stephan.

If Eusebius is mostly responsible for the final form of Josephus and he faked large passages to corroborate the Gospels and Acts, why did he do such a piss-poor job? If promulgating to Josephus to corroborate the Gospels and Acts was not his aim, what was?

You need to have a motivation for these conspirators to do what you're saying they did.

andrewcriddle

It may be worth noting that the original name of the sorcerer in Josephus was probably Atomos. The name Simon may well be based on the Christian tradition about Simon Magus.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

Who in antiquity claimed the final form of Josephus was a piss-poor job??? There is NO evidence that anyone in antiquity made such a claim.

What we find in the final form of Josephus must have appeared to be very good to those who had it manipulatred.

Duke Leto

See above. Stephan says that the manipulators were Christian. The only logical reason to manipulate it would be to put in evidence of the Gospel narrative and the Acts stories. Apart from the Testimonium, which can be understood as a Dark Age interpolation. If they were manipulating to prove Jesus was the Christ they did a very bad job of it. If that wasn't their motivation then what was?

Stephan keeps on insisting that his heterodox viewpoint is OBVIOUSLY right without providing the key ingredient: Why go to great lengths to fabricate a spurious history of Judea that doesn't support your agenda?

stephan huller

Christianity existed before acts and the canonical gospels. The history of the Jews by flavius Josephus was written in 147 CE. the canonical gospels and acts were written subsequent to that date. IMO "Theophilus" = Theophilus of Antioch

Duke Leto

OK, that just moves you to point two of my little dilemma.

Why go to the trouble of fabricating a Judean history at all? What WAS the agenda the forger was trying to promote?

stephan huller

Because the Marcionites (the dominant form of Christianity in the Empire at this time) said that Judaism (= the Law and prophets) was separate from the revelation of the gospel. Josephus, a Jewish Christian, disagreed

Duke Leto

OK, now we're finally getting somewhere.

So WHY use an Aramaic hypomena from a historical Joseph? (Bit of a coincidence that our hypothesized 2nd Century Jewish Christian was named Josephus too. Any chance he had a sister named Drusilla?)

On what grounds do you believe the received text shows ANY evidence of Christian belief on the author's part besides the Testimonium? (If you refer me to "Shaye Cohen says so" again I actually am going to mail him to check, the notion that Josephus was a Christian seems totally at odds with the dust jacket description of his book.)

Why would the author deliberately fabricate any part of history? It's easier and more convincing to just plagiarize someone else then it is to make something up and risk getting caught out.

If there was material more geared towards Christian evangelism, why did Eusebius remove it? Documents tend to get larger as time goes on, not smaller.

So what? Right now all you've got is "pseudo-Josephus wrote a history based on Joseph's outline, this was picked up by "Luke" and "Acts" as a major source." Doesn't change what we know about history unless pseudo-Josephus changed some things, and you've given us no reason to believe he did. He may even be accurately relating the story of Herodian Drusilla, since we know that Tacitus is at least partly wrong and there's nothing prima facie absurd about Felix marrying two Drusillas. (Nothing any more absurd than two Josephuses anyway.) It might possibly have some bearing on what the genuine story of Jesus is, but I really don't care much about it in the least.

We live in the world affected by Constantine, not by Jesus.

Toto

According to Steve Mason in Josephus and the New Testament, IIRC, Christians made use of Josephus to demonstrate God's wrath against the Jews. They didn't need to show anything about early Christian history, but they needed for some reason to show that the Jews were no longer God's favorites.

I don't know if this shows a motive for forgery, but if it was the motive, it wasn't such a piss poor job.

Duke Leto

Problem is that wrath against the Jews is what the Marcionites wanted, not Stephan pseudo-Josephus. And if the bit about God's wrath came from a Jewish Joseph's hypomena they'd just be exapting his point about the need to submit to Rome bringing God's wrath as proving that God had abandoned the Jews. Which is what they did under the current paradigm.

A Jew surviving the destruction of Jerusalem concluding that it was a punishment from God sent because of some indiscretion is not a phenomena unique to 1st Century Joseph. Jeremiah did it before.