Iskander

You are a published author with original ideas and an obvious capacity for hard work and one endowed with boundless tolerance.


Why don’t you spend more time on preparing your next book and less, much less, on entertaining yahoos in the market square?

Duke Leto

Blithely repeating that something is a fact over and over again when a perfectly plausible alternative reading has been offered is a fundamentalist trick. Just because you keep saying it doesn't make it so.

I keep asking for better evidence and you keep evading the question. Are you trying to prove my earlier accusation that you have no intellectual integrity?

andrewcriddle

Another possibility is that this fragment is not really by Irenaeus.

Andrew Criddle

stephan huller

Andrew, on Irenaeus's use of Josephus:

Schreckenberg's book is one of the best tracing the use of Josephus in the Church Fathers. No evidence for the use of Jewish War though which is odd.

Duke Leto

Let's review, shall we?

1. Acknowledgement that Drusilla of Mauritania is every bit as poorly documented as Herodian Drusilla - None.
2. Explanation as to why 2nd Century Josephus would invent Herodian Drusilla - None.
3. Explanation for why 2nd Century Josephus/Hegesippus would just happen to have the same name as the 1st Century Joseph - None. (A coincidence that there were two Drusillas is implausible but the coincidence that Joseph and his alleged redactor have the same name is not?)
4. Explanation as to why the Church Fathers would corrupt Josephus into Hegesippus but keep Joseph correct in Gospels - None.
5. Demonstration that Hegesippus MUST be a corruption of Josephus - None.
6. Simple explanation as to why it is impossible that Clement and the other guy actually were quoting Hegesippus (or a Christian historian like him) who was writing in 147 CE and used 1st Century Josephus' chronology to establish his own up to 147 CE - None.
7. Sane reason why, if Ireanaeus finalized Luke by adding material from 2nd Century Josephus, he chose to add the glaring contradiction in the dates of the infancy narratives - None. (Mental retardation simply won't cut it.)
8. Explanation as to why Eusebius chose to excise almost all Christian material from 2nd Century Josephus, leaving only the Testimonium in the wrong place chronologically, when the obvious choice would have been to edit it - None.

You need good, in some cases damned good answers to all of the above before any historian is going to accept your 2nd Century Josephus theory, Stephan. Whatever the 48 or so other reasons might be.

While we're at it I'd really like a page citation in Shaye Cohen's Josephus book where he states that the Synergoi or redactor must be a Chistian or Jewish Christian. You keep implying you have a source for it and I don't believe you do.

You can open a Josephus thread if you really want, maryhelena. I can see how Josephus thought himself a new Jeremiah but it looks to me like he also tried to be Thucydides.

stephan huller

Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – AD 117) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. Josephus/Hegesippus is a person unknown whose literary creation was facilitated by unknown synergoi and countless bastard texts in which gossip, apocryphal stories many with a Christian bent were incorporated into the mix. No one in their right mind would prefer Josephus to Tacitus unless they were believer or an idiot with an ax to grind.

stephan huller

Misunderstanding or corruption of Tacitus. Happens all the time in Josephus. Take the example of the transvestite militants who allegedly seize Jerusalem and its population are blamed for the downfall of the city. One could write a whole book on stupid stories in Josephus.

stephan huller

Josephus is still a common name among the Jews. Another example of people living a century apart with the same name - Clement. Theophilus the high priest and Theophilus of Antioch. The list goes on and on.

stephan huller

Clement's Josephus was original. No one before Clement mentions Josephus. Clement clearly testifies that he wrote in 147 CE. This text became known as the hypomnemata of Hegesippus to distinguish it from the Josephus the first century Jew who originally spoke Aramaic but somehow after his captivity (like Joseph Conrad) learned a new language (Greek) and moreover a love of Greek culture (strangely keeping his Jewish roots presumably) and decided on his own initiative to write a Jewish version of the Roman Antiquities with the help of Greek synergoi.

stephan huller

I cited Chilsolm's book. Using google and see for yourself. No one doubts this etymology.