spin

I can appreciate you penchant for self-delusion and projection, but let's continue...

Is the parallel between something we know happened with Mark and that which you are considering for the Annals so difficult for you to grasp?

Gawd, you fall over yourself. You are totally off the topic you started, just because you have to make kneejerk reactions. Try to focus. You were trying to understand how a doctored copy of Tacitus could have survived, implying that one couldn't. Yet one copy of Mark was doctored and it survived in many manuscripts. Many more copies of Mark have reached us from antiquity than have copies of the Annals.

If your questions I answered were rhetorical you should have indicated it.

I have listed over several threads my reasons for thinking that the Tacitus post is not from Tacitus. That means it was added later. Our first surviving copy of the Annals comes from the renaissance. How representative do you think that copy was for the early textual tradition? Think about it: how many times had the one manuscript from antiquity been copied before we arrived at this one that survived? Wouldn't that be one exemplar among many many thousand? So, how representative do you think that copy was for the early textual tradition?


spin

judge

Ok.


One can see a parallel. However as we are dealing with annals and not John I asked about annals. Yes, this makes the question more difficult I realise this.
Easy questions, are, easy to answer.

Ok thanks for answering the question. You think, on the basis of your own thoughts on the matter that it happened.
However there are several reasonable posts here that you have not dealt with (unless you previously dealt with the arguments in other threads.)

Here is one and here is another (although perhaps your lingusitic analysis cover all those points?).
There are more.

I'm trying to see if I can understand what convinced you and how you remain convinced in the light of all this. these are questions that occur to me when I think about it.

This is the case I am asking you to make. Can we narrow it down at all?


To me there seems more reason to be skeptical that to be convinced. Thanks for your time on this. I know you do like to try, as much as you can to "follow the evidence" that's why I appreciate your looking at more difficult questions.

spin

I have said all I needed to say. You asked a loaded question. I made it go bang. It's your task to see that it was loaded... or not. I shan't beat it into you.


spin

the_cave

This is all very interesting...so:

1) If Pilate could have been a prefect and a procurator at the same time (controversial, needs more support), and

2) If Tacitus' information about the purported Neronean persecutions came directly from Christians who had begun legendizing their material, and

3) If Annals did not reach wide circulation among Christians until the fourth century at the earliest

--then the passage could be authentic. This says nothing about its worth in establishing an historical Jesus, but it would tell us something about the Christian community at the time of Tacitus.

Could it also be the case that Tacitus was just being sloppy? The title of "procurator" may have been taken directly from Josephus...perhaps Tacitus got some information--in the form of an early creed, maybe, plus some legends about the (real, but minor) Neronean persecution--from Christians, looked up the Pilate situation in Josephus, and wrote a brief note about it all without investigating further.

Is that too implausible? We would still have to wonder why Josephus made the mistake...which brings us back to 1), which, again, is interesting but needs more support.

I ask again: could Pilate have spent the temple tax monies on an aqueduct if he had not been a procurator?

aa5874

Well, what factual errors are there in Tacitus' works? How did you establish those facts?

Roger Pearse

Roman local government was much looser than our own. Basically governors could do anything they wanted in many ways, so long as they kept the peace. But... they could always be at the mercy of someone haring off to Rome and slandering them to the emperor, so this kept things in line to some extent.

Of course there were rules, and books on the duties of officials. But the Roman empire was not a modern state, and we sometimes forget this at our peril. Governors could ruin provinces, and cover up their misdeeds, if they chose (as Count Romanus did to Leptis Magna in the late 4th century, and forced the Leptans to apologise for "false accusations" against him!).

I doubt that laying hands on Jewish temple funds would have troubled Tiberius one iota.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

the_cave

I'm not concerned with Tiberius' reaction--in fact he doesn't seem to have cared! Although Pilate's Jewish subjects seem to have cared a lot (since they rioted--possibly also these were Pharisees protesting the use of their specific donations on benefits for all!)

I'm asking a) whether Pilate technically had the authority to do this as a prefect b) would Josephus have known whether he had this authority or not, and c) would Tacitus have known whether he had this authority or not?

If prefects had authority to spend funds however they wanted, then what was the functional difference between a prefect and a procurator?

Does Josephus call Pilate a procurator because he knows he had access (functional access, anyway) to the temple funds?

Does Tacitus do the same?

sugarhitman

When critics say "added by christians" im guessing they are referring to the Roman church, yes? And if the Roman church added to Josephus and Tacitus whats the point? I mean the Church after all denied the public from possesing bibles that testifies about Jesus's existence and works. That alone shows their intent, which was to render the public defenseless against their own corrupt interpretations like Indulgence, Inqusitions, God's appointment of the Popes as rulers over the world and other such wicked deceptions. So why would they be interested in trying to prove or fabricate Jesus's existence and at the same time deny the *biblical* Jesus from the public? It doesnt add up.

spin

Please read my cited earlier post as to Tacitus's knowledge of the administrative structure of Judea.

From what we see in Josephus, Pilate tended to do what he thought he could get away with regarding his administration. We can see however that Pilate wasn't managing finances in Judea. He merely attempted to get the temple pay for a project that he advocated for supplying water to Jerusalem, which he probably thought was ultimately a beneficial act, then attempted to get the cash by force. He didn't have financial control.

Besides have you seen where any Roman official held two administrative positions at the same time?? If so where? The evidence is clearly that a Roman official went from one official appointment to another.

Josephus was written in Greek. He used epitropos and it is hard to understand what that meant exactly before procurators made it into the Greek speaking world as governors and were later labeled by the Greek term. Before Claudius procurators weren't used as governors so epitropos should not be appropriate in the early case.

When he has already shown that he knew the historical development in administrative structure?


spin

the_cave

I have discovered that it turns out that Josephus calls Fadus an eparchon in Ant. 18.363, but quotes Claudius calling him an epitropoi in Ant. 20.14! (And yes, I looked it up on Perseus.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=lKv...l=en#PPA215,M1

I'm happy to assume, however, that the correct title for Fadus was epitropoi, and that Josephus just uses eparchon in an inexact or colloquial manner sometimes. But I would like to know: is this your assumption as well? And, of course, it worked the other way around as well--

So you take the position that Josephus simply used both terms interchangeably?

How about this: whoever wrote the passage in Annals, they were reading Josephus (or Philo). I don't know if we can say whether it was Tacitus or not.