Minimalist

Not to mention the fact that the two would have had to be former Roman consuls. There were not. In fact, only two members of the Sulpician gens made it to the consulship in the first century BC. Servius Sulpicius Rufus in 51 BC and Publius Sulpicius Quirinius in 12.

I realize that does not stop Fundies from inventing spare consuls when it suits their needs. I had one guy ask on another board how did I "not know that there may have been another Publius Sulpicius Quirinius who also served as governor of Syria!" They are inventive in their desperation. This particular guy was a literalist who says that if there is one mistake in the bible then there is no hope for mankind.

I actually agree with him about there being no hope for mankind but it has nothing to do with his bible.

EarlDoherty

The short answer to your question, Diana, is that Goguel does nothing to support his assertion--other than rule out all the other options that are actually conceivable. And I might add that Peter Kirby does nothing to help Goguel do so, nor does he point out that Goguel offers nothing in support of his contention. For Kirby to simply appeal to Goguel’s statement in the way he does (“note well the contrary opinion of…”) in the absence of any argument to that end by Goguel himself, speaks for Kirby’s obvious concern throughout all of his site to support the HJ theory over the MJ one.

This is how I treat Goguel’s statement in my three-part, 43,000 word rebuttal to just about every major argument put forward in the 20th century by scholars who claim that the Jesus myth theory is debunkable and has in fact been debunked. I blow this horn myself because it seems that regardless of how much appeal there is on boards like this to the ‘fact’ that JM hasn’t a leg to stand on (and this is why we don’t get addressed in “respectable” journals), no one seems to have bothered to read it, let alone actually take it into account in their regular parroting of the “demolition of JM” claim. It begins here. The following quote is from Part One:

Note that the “Price” referred to in the final sentence is Christopher Price, an apologist who hangs out on Bede’s site, and who a couple of years ago posted a very lame supportive article there of that century of alleged debunkers of Jesus mythicism. His article I also reference and rebut throughout my three-part response. Even Price hasn’t deigned to respond to the latter.

Incidentally, the above passage is not all I have to say in that article on the subject of Tacitus, as I address several writers who naturally appeal to the same ‘proofs’ for their imagined debunking of Jesus mythicism. With each one, I discuss the given topic from a different point of view and emphasis, dependent on how the scholar I am addressing has handled it.

Earl Doherty

diana

Earl,

Thank you for your careful response. I'm not clear on what this means, though. Perhaps you can help:

What the devil does that mean? It "presumed an eclipse of Christianity after the death of Jesus"?

Thanks. Oh...I'm enjoying your book, btw.

d

Minimalist

Yet, the very question under discussion seems to be what exactly is this so-called "total evidence."

Just once, I'd love one of these bible-thumpers to give a straight answer to that question without a lot of character assassination (which seems to be their chief tactic) or a resorting to magical formulas.

EarlDoherty

Tacitus' (reputed) text says: "...This execrable superstition, held in check/suppressed for a time, broke out anew, not only in Judea..." Although the phrase about suppression for a time is enigmatic, since it is not clear what exactly this refers to, it implies that, as Goguel says, after Jesus' death the movement faltered, or went into "eclipse", which he considers a Christian would not have written or acknowledged. I don't particularly agree with him, especially because the meaning is uncertain. It's particularly problematic if we assume Tacitus really wrote it. What could he have known about the early history of Christianity that could have led him to make such a statement?

I'm glad you're enjoying the read.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

I am indebted to Richard Carrier for summing up (in an email) several cases of “accidental” loss of books within historians’ accounts in which we should have found some reference to an historical Jesus and other elements in relation to him. I guess coincidence and “sheer accident” reign supreme in support of mythicists in regard to all this missing evidence.

On Tacitus:

“Robert Drews, "The Lacuna in Tacitus' Annales Book Five in the Light
of Christian Traditions." American Journal of Ancient History 9.2
(1984): 112-22.
“….Drews argues that Christians
probably deliberately excised two years from Tacitus, from mid-29
A.D. to mid-31 A.D. (and thus the whole of the year 30) due to
embarrassment at his omission of any mention of Jesus there (or such
things as the worldwide darkness, etc.), which his mention under 64
A.D. entails (i.e. Tacitus could not have mentioned Jesus earlier or
else he would have said so when digressing on the fire, and would not
have had to enter his digression there instead). This lacuna is
otherwise strange and hard to explain (unlike other lacunas in
Tacitus, as Drews notes).”

On Seneca:

“By Seneca I assume you mean his (lost) On Superstition that Augustine
quotes, while also noting it didn't mention Christians, yet attacked
every sect, pagan and Jewish. That's the only Senecan text we would
expect to mention Christianity. But it is curious indeed that it
wasn't preserved at all, despite almost everything Seneca wrote
having been preserved, and the fact that you'd think Christians would
love a text that attacked Jews and pagans, especially by such an
eminent pagan philosopher as Seneca.”

Further:

“There is also a lacuna in Cassius Dio: all the years 6 B.C. to 2 B.C.
In _The Augustan Succession: An Historical Commentary on Cassius
Dio's Roman History Books 55-56_, Peter Swan notes that Dio's
surviving material implies he discussed Herod's death in this period.
And though Swan doesn't bring it up, in light of Drews case for
Tacitus (see above) we can conjecture a Christian would expect Dio to
also discuss the slaughter of innocents, any magic star or goings on
about messiah's and magi at Herod's court, and so on, or even the
birth of Jesus, etc., so his silence on these might have been as
embarrassing as in case of Tacitus. This lacuna is apparently quite
thorough, even subsequent epitomes exclude it, even though they often
fill gaps in the text elsewhere.
(This is only briefly discussed in Swan (p. 188, with pp. 36-38), and
he makes no mention of any Drews-style hypothesis. That's just my
suggestion.)”

And on a somewhat different subject:

You might recall I told you how in Hippolytus, Refutation of All
Heresies, books 2 and 3 are mysteriously missing. Yet at the end of
book 1 he said he was going to reveal all the mystery religions and
what they teach and then discuss astrology. Book 4 begins astrology,
which means 2 and 3 were about mystery cults--in other words, the one
book (or rather pair of books) that would have told us how much and
which elements the Christians borrowed or adapted from pagan mystery
religions, was curiously ripped out and destroyed. You might also
recall that in various places I have drawn parallels between the
Christ passion, and the myth and public festival of the death and
resurrection of Romulus (in Mark as well as Luke, especially--
curiously, Marcus and Lucius were among the names of those ritually
shouted out at the Romulus festival, as the end of Plutarch's Life of
Romulus attests, Gaius (Caius) being the third, which is also Julius
Caesar's name, as well as Caligula's, but I digress...).

Well, it just occurred to me to ask whether the Romulus festival is
described by Ovid in his Fasti, a poem describing all the religious
festivals at Rome and what went on in them and why, throughout the
year. I knew the Fasti is only extant in its first half, covering
January to June, the remaining months are lost. Hmmmm. Could the
Romulus festival just "happen" to fall in that second half of the
calendar? So I checked. Plutarch says it took place on the Nones of
July (July 7). Curious how that's the first book of the missing half
of the Fasti.”

“Hmmmm” is right! My thanks to Richard.

Earl Doherty

Amaleq13

Do you think the Gospels and Acts, where they describe the disciples scattering and hiding and suggest a wait of over a month to publicly proclaim the risen Christ, sufficient to inspire such an interpretation?

EarlDoherty

Possibly so--to a Christian who knew the Gospel story, and the Acts story (subsequent to when Acts was written, which I and several others, including Robert Price) think was the mid-2nd century.

But for Tacitus himself? Hardly. Could we possibly think that Tacitus was familiar with the Gospels and Acts to that extent that he would be led to refer to this 'hiatus' in Christian fortunes in his brief reference to Christ? Not even orthodox scholars think that Tacitus got his information about Christ from reading Christian documents. The Christians themselves hardly seem to know the Gospels in Tacitus' day. And nobody witnesses to Acts before 170, other than a possible unattributed allusion in Justin. Nor can I see Tacitus 'picking up' such a thought orally from Christians, much less deciding to refer to it in his text.

It's one argument supporting the Tacitus reference as a Christian insertion. Otherwise, we have to come up with some other possible meaning for Tacitus' enigmatic phrase.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

He could have known this line from Josephus:

...those who had first loved him did not cease to do so; for [they reported that]* he appeared to them on the third day....

* Agapius.

It is easy to infer from these words that the movement was checked at the crucifixion itself and revived three days later.

Ben.

[Ducks and runs. ]

lee_merrill

All well and good, only the conclusion that Jerusalem in Solomon / David's time was a small hamlet involves the assumption that the extent of Jerusalem must match those aspects of the city now, that the destruction of Jerusalem would not have destroyed those parts, and so on. It's an argument from silence, and speaking of such...

Yet archaeologist Jerry Vardaman found a coin with the name of Quirinius in 'micrographic' letters, which he concludes would place a Quirinius as proconsul of Syria and Cilicia from 11 B.C. until after the death of Herod. Now there may also have been one Quirinius, who became proconsul twice, that also would do¹.

"Given the cycle of a census every fourteen years, that would work out quite well"².

And since some here are speaking of Nazareth, another cautionary tale, it was said that there was no such place by some³, yet there was a discovery of a list of families who were relocated after the destruction of the temple, one was sent and registered in Nazareth. "From the tombs ... it can be concluded that Nazareth was a strongly Jewish settlement in the Roman period"⁴.

Regards,
Lee

[1] "The Case for Christ", Lee Strobel, p. 136.

[2] "The Case for Christ", Lee Strobel quoting archaeologist John McRay, p. 136.

[3] "Where Jesus Never Walked", Frank Zindler.

[4] "The Archaeology of the New Testament", Jack Finegan, p. 46.