Toto

I'm not sure if you read or understood the OP. Earl is opposing the idea that Tacitus' Annals is a Renaissance forgery, but with different reasoning from Roger Pearse. He does not endorse either Ross or Drews, and indicated that he had not read Ross, and would only be interested in reading Ross to see how urban legends spread.

Jeffrey Gibson

Got it. But backhandedly, this still shows that the question of how good Ross' scholarship was is a relevant issue for the OP and precisely for the reasons I stated.

Jeffrey

Toto

Let's assume that mountainman was talking through his hat, or just assumed incorrectly that anyone who could read an ancient language qualified as a good scholar. There's no need to beat this point into the ground.

Ross is not especially relevant except possibly as a source for the idea that Doherty and Pearse both oppose.

I think that Earl posted this here for feedback.

EarlDoherty

You'll have to forgive Jeffrey for not reading my OP, Toto. Once he saw that I got Ross's initials wrong, that meant that nothing I could have said in that OP would have been worth reading any further.

Earl Doherty

mountainman

That's what I thought and that's why I posted the reference to the source document cited, authored by Ross which I had read and which I had made a summary of the contents.

Are we not here to deal with the source rather than the messenger? Ross states the reasons he felt compelled to write up a thesis in which he finds forgery as the basis for texts we have named as the Annals of Tacitus. Why dont these reasons get listed? Surely these reasons will tell us why Ross thought that the Forgery of Tacitus’ Annals in the Renaissance is certainly not an Untenable Position? The academic derision of the presence of forgery is unjustified by the similar patterns of facts in history. Forgery is a very real political reality which academics and academic treatments often euphemise under the carpet.



Best wishes


Pete

Jeffrey Gibson

That's one indication. :devil3:

Jeffrey

mountainman

To repeat the link from the other thread ...

Review of Ross
Here are its concluding proclamations ....





Whoever is the author of this review is saying that
his work is to be compared to any of the
recent attempts which have been made to
shake the authority of the Fourth Gospel .

Who were these contemporaries being cited?
And what are these works?
And what is the qualification of the author of the review?




Best wishes,



Pete

spamandham

I suppose you could argue a later forger might have based his forgery off of an actual earlier text that had such information in it, but that certainly would be grasping at straws without something to base the claim on.

Simonmagus

I've read Ross' work and personally I believe his arguments require far too much in the way of assumption and shaky interpretation to be tenable. I'm not sure who else has noticed it, but Ross' agenda seemed more of an attack on Christianity, with the Annals representing nothing short of collateral damage.

He seemed to regard the Annals as a forgery due to it crossing through the hands of the Christian church, but his supporting evidence of it being a forgery is not strong by any means, and requires the reader to submit to weakly substantiated theories and a whole lot of hoopla.

Honestly, his work only seemed to be more of an attack on Christianity than the Annals, with an agenda designed to seemingly discredit Annals as merely a means of attacking the church.

I could not escape the idea that Ross harbored a deep-rooted disdain for religion in general, and of anything connected to religion. I'd have to conclude that the man was a militant type atheist who reached so far to the left that he simply became unbelievable.

EarlDoherty

...of a very transparent technique Jeffrey has of focusing on an insignificant error as a means of avoiding engaging with the meat of a matter, something that might require actual counter-arguments of substance.

Of course, in this case, no one would expect Jeffrey to argue against my position and defend Renaissance forgery of the Annals, but I realize that once one gets into the habit of something, it's hard to break.

Incidentally, I'm disappointed that Roger hasn't weighed in on this thread, perhaps to comment on some of the points that might be seen as affecting issues broader than the specific question of Renaissance forgery, such as why there is such silence on the Annals in Christian circles if it contained the passage in 15:44. Sulpicius Severus is a puzzling lone voice, open to other interpretations in his relationship with our extant Annals passage.

Earl Doherty