Chaucer

http://www.freeratio.org//showthread...83#post6026983

Chaucer

spin

Read it, trashed it. You are not dealing with the significance of the term to our apologetic historian. Your analogy is false, as the term you choose has no specific religious significance to the user/writer. I have pointed out that Josephus clearly deals with the term christos is a specific way: he avoids it, he omits it and you want to believe that has no impact on an analysis of AJ 20.

Arguments based solely on analogy are by nature not arguments.


spin

Chaucer

People who sometimes refer to Jesus as Jesus Christ don't always say that with religious intent.

Chaucer

spin

And a modern analogy even. Doh!


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Chaucer

Never mind modern. How about early second century? Those like Tacitus, who didn't conceal his contempt for Christianity, actually refer to Jesus as Christ, evidently NOT in a spirit of religious reverence but simply because that was what he had come to be called. Regardless of how or where Tacitus came to know the story, he is clearly adopting a tone of contempt while still using the "Christ" term.

Chaucer

aa5874

There is not enough information to claim a tone of contempt. Tacitus never mentioned the word Jesus anywhere in Annals 15.44 and the word CHRISTUS is only mentioned once.

Chaucer

But clearly not in a tone of reverence, thereby showing that the term itself had become more generalized.

Chaucer

spin

Sorry, I find such apparently gormlessness off-putting.

If you understand the Orwellian notion of "who controls the present controls the past", you wouldn't cite to me waves of suspect material. The text of Tacitus like Josephus was preserved for us by our christian brothers, who were unaware of the fact that Pilate was not a procurator, but a prefect, and that procurators didn't have control of provinces until the time of Claudius. Tacitus knows about the issue, so the mistake is not his, but the interpolator's, who is also unaware of Tacitus's style, when the interpolation was added at the end of the attack on Nero, disfiguring the attack and moving off topic onto christians and how passersby even felt sorry for them. There are numerous problems trying to foist the passage as that of Tacitus, especially when Tacitus was reputed as one of the best orators of his era and yet there is an awful alliteration in it.

Run along to Suetonius and we'll carve that one up for you. Ultimately, you'll have to make do with Pliny the Younger's christians as a benchmark. And because of our Orwellian dictum, even that becomes suspect because of the tamperings with the other texts. Content gets bowdlerized by the powers that be: think of Soviet histories or American censored lists. Christians have written spurious Pauline letters and even spurious letters by the emperor Julian. You need a critical approach to the texts you use.


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Chaucer

If Christians were responsible for the passage, then how come we see in the oldest surviving ms. of the passage that an "e" in "chrest" has been officiously corrected to an "i"? Now that seems to be the Orwell process busily at work, IMO. I doubt that any zealous Christian would have initially made a reference to Chrest or Chrestians. The later scratch-out is more likely Christian than the original passage.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

spin

Probably a French scribe. (Stop the deflections. You've made too many for one day.)


spin