Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Duke Leto · 07-15-2012, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

Let's get something straight here. You came on like gangbusters accusing me of all kinds of things even before we stopped to say hello. I called you 'Duke Leotards' as my worst offense.

I have my temper. I've retracted those accusations which I found to be untrue. I note you have not even bothered to respond to the bogus Amazon reviews, which might be taken as evidence of "mens rea". Faking good reviews for your books may not be illegal, but it is certainly totally classless.

Doesn't change the fact that you started this conversation strutting around like the prettiest little intellectual revisionist peacock at the zoo and you haven't stopped once to acknowledge the slightest possibility that you might be mistaken on any point.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

I don't need to explain how we ended up with one version of Josephus and Clement had another. It is enough to say that Clement had another unless you or anyone else argues that he is misidentifying his source.

You haven't PROVEN that Clement had a different Josephus. You haven't proven he read Josephus at all. I could say that Eratosthenes calculated that the Trojan War ended in 1183 BCE. I have never read Eratosthenes in Greek or English, but I know that this was his date from secondary sources.

If Clement had quoted lengthy passages from Josephus verbatim, AND turned around quoted a passage that doesn't appear in Josephus as Josephus, then you'd be on firmer ground.

As it stands the chronological bit you want us to obsess over here may simply be "copy and pasted" from another Christian writer, maybe one from 147 CE, who was writing on chronology or history. Maybe this was Hegesippus, and this was a real person and not a garbling of Josephus after all.

To overthrow the assumption that a 1st Century individual named Josephus wrote the texts attributed to Josephus and mysterious Christian forgers did in the 2nd Century for reasons you refuse to explain, you have to address all of the little points in my list in an above post. People don't do things of no benefit to them at great effort and expense. (I'm aware of martyrs, martyrs get their smug self-satisfaction and promise of "eternal reward", and getting someone else to kill you isn't hard work.)

You're simply giving your 2nd Century Christian forgers too much credit for intelligence here.

The short SHORT version of all my analysis on the Mauritanian Drusillas is that as accurate an author as Tacitus may have been, he's dead wrong on Felix's wife being a granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra, since any daughter of Selene would be long past marriageable even as early as 40 CE. Tacitus was mistaken on other incidental details here and there. Apparently he had Antonia Major and Antonia Minor backwards a couple of times, although I can't find the citation on this.

If Tacitus can be wrong on the woman's generation, then why not her name? If Drusilla of Mauritania was really named Cleopatra then your argument from incredulity on Felix going from Drusilla to Drusilla falls apart. It's also just possible that both women WERE named Drusilla though.

The bottom line is your argument from incredulity on Felix's marriages doesn't hold water, your insistence on misreading Clement isn't impressing anyone, and if you actually have 48 other reasons for believing this absurd hypothesis that Josephus is a 2nd Century forgery they'd better be good and address the problems of your forgers being better than almost any in history. (Certainly better than Oded Golan, anyway.)

The fact that you appear to be massively intellectually and possibly personally dishonest doesn't help your case.

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:08 PM

I don't know what kind of 'proof' you were expecting but I thought 'the tenth year of Antoninus' being in two different witnesses identifying a chronology of Josephus/Hegesippus dated to that year is pretty fucking impressive. Short of discovering the original manuscript that's a pretty good start. Most people have been working on the 'Testamonium Flavianum' angle arguing that it is a later Christian insertion into a first century text. My explanation is better than that which puts me into the elite rankings of Josephan scholarship ... until of course someone comes up with a better explanation.

I could if I wanted put this argument into a paper and have it published somewhere. I just can't be bothered.

If you'd like to debate the merits of my book, by all means start a thread and I bet I can convince you that its central premise isn't as unreasonable as it might seem. I bet half the reason you've stopped attacking me is that you've come to realize there really is something to this second century dating of Josephus's History of the Jews. I can do the same with respect to the Real Messiah. I just hate being predictable. I hate pushing an agenda but I am always willing to explain.

The point here at least is that there was a chronology, dated to the 'tenth year of Antoninus' and alternatively identified as being by 'Flavius Josephus' or 'Hegesippus.' It was written by a Christian and IMO it was designed to counter the original chronology of Justus of Tiberias which was a first century witness to the events of 70 CE. Not surprisingly no longer exists. The reason the History of the Jews was reworked was because it made Acts look bad. It made it clear that Acts was written post 150 CE.

The author of this 'History of the Jews' couldn't have known that his work would be cited in a text which became the official history of the Christian Church. Unfortunately for him and the original work, it became necessary to cut the 'Josephus reporting on Josephus' which still appears in various sections of the Latin text of Hegesippus. Indeed what few people notice - if memory serves me correct - is that when the Latin text of Jewish War cites the Testimonium Flavianum it appears as one of those 'Josephus on Josephus' moments.

Duke Leto · 07-15-2012, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

The point is that I can't see how it is unreasonable to suggest that the History of the Jews by Flavius Josephus was indeed written in 147 CE as two independent sources of testimony acknowledge. If this is true, it stands to reason the author was a Christian or a 'Jewish Christian' and - as Shaye Cohen and others have also intimated - pulled together different scraps of information, perhaps even an original 'hypomnema of a first century Jew named Joseph, and assembled a much broader composition which resembled our current Jewish War - or more correctly the Five Books ascribed to 'Hegesippus' and which is used as the source for various texts detailing the events of the fall of Jerusalem (i.e. the Slavonic text, the Yosippon, the Arabic text etc).

I can't for the life of me see why this is an unreasonable hypothesis given the state of the evidence.

My cursory research on Shaye Cohen indicates that he wrote a biography of the 1st Century Jewish Josephus, which is a rather eccentric thing to do if you believe the works bearing his name to be a forgery.

Could you give me a coherent description of what you believe Dr. Cohen believes so that I can email it to his public Harvard email and corroborate it?

Duke Leto · 07-15-2012, 04:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stephan huller

I don't know what kind of 'proof' you were expecting but I thought 'the tenth year of Antoninus' being in two different witnesses identifying a chronology of Josephus/Hegesippus dated to that year is pretty fucking impressive. Short of discovering the original manuscript that's a pretty good start.

Scientific/Scholarly evidence would be fine.

Hegesippus being a person who summarized Josephus in 147 CE for a Christian audience is a much simpler scenario than Josephus being Hegesippus, written in 147 CE and subsequently trimmed to make our received Josephus. Even if Hegesippus is a corruption of Josephus, and I have a really hard time seeing how they could corrupt Josephus in the church fathers' writing but leave Joseph in the Gospels, your second Hegesippus source could well be an unnamed summarizer who is being quoted twice and attributed to Josephus.

You need to explain the motivation for such an elaborate fraud when it mostly does nothing to benefit the furtherance of the early church.

Is this not making sense? History has rules and being brutally picked apart by other historians is one of them. Theology is where you get to make up anything you want.

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:25 PM

But there is no Josephus to summarize. That's what your not getting. Hegesippus = Josephus. It was just a convenient way of obscuring the Josephus on Josephus angle of the original text - or better yet - the fact that the original author was writing from the second century. This is critical. This appears in critical sections of the Latin Jewish War when Josephus the first century Jew appears. The author inexplicably speaks about Josephus in the third person - not just in the Latin text - but traces of the original material make their way even to the 'standard' Greek text that everyone celebrates as a first century text.

This use of the third person is best explained by the original text being written at some distance from the events in question and by someone other than Josephus the first century Jew. It is precisely for this reason that the synergoi were invented. Have you found references to the concept of the synergoi in Josephus yet?

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:26 PM

Quote:

Could you give me a coherent description of what you believe Dr. Cohen believes so that I can email it to his public Harvard email and corroborate it?

What am I, your secretary? Buy this Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development As a Historian (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Shaye Cohen argues that at the core of the Jewish War is an Aramaic hypomnema which is authentically Josephan.

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:31 PM

Here's a summary in John Dominic Crossan:

http://books.google.com/books?id=AsP...%20war&f=false

Cohen noticed the parallels underneath various texts of Josephus and posited the existence of this ur-text.

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:32 PM

Here is an example of his methodology from Josephus in Galilee comparing parallel chronologies in Jewish War [BJ] and Vita [V]:

Quote:

Thus in both sequence and (at least to some degree) content V[ita] has a more pristine form of the material than BJ. But, as we remarked in chapter one above in our criticism of Laqueur, that which is more pristine is not necessarily that which is earlier. Therefore a more significant example of V's primacy is the parallel V 86//BJ 615, from the episode of John at Tiberias. "He (Josephus) did not yet suspect the plotter (John)," BJ 615), makes little sense in BJ, after John's murderous plots of BJ 593-594 and the "Josephan gloss" of 599 and seems to be a careless paraphrase of V's "I did not suspect that he would do anything wicked." In V the words make sense because John's machinations, as described by V 70-76, were not such as to arouse suspicion. Here then is a good indication of the literary priority of V.

By priority we mean that V, although written after BJ, contains as its nucleus a document which was written much earlier and was utilized by BJ. The existence of this document is supported by more than just the parallel V 86//BJ 615. The relationship of BJ 2 to V is similar to the relationship of BJ 1 to AJ 15-16 (see above) and this analogy suggests that the "common source" behind BJ 2 and V was not just Josephus' memory but a written document. The "original sequence" preserved by V and thematically revised by BJ, is the sequence of this work. This theory also explains the literary peculiarities of V. If V were a mere sloppy retelling of the story of Josephus' career in Galilee, written all at one time some thirty years after the events in order to refute Justus and based primarily on Josephus' memory (perhaps refreshed by a quick perusal of BJ), we could not explain why the clear organization of BJ was not followed more closely, why Justus' role is so spotty and peripheral, and why his name often appears in sentences which have no connection with their context and no consequence for the action (see chapter five below, section C 1). This argument in favor of the common source theory was emphasized (actually overemphasized) by Laqueur. The only other systematic way to explain Justus' marginal role is to suppose that Josephus had written an autobiography, attached it to AJ, but later, after Justus' attack, converted it to serve his need for a self-defense. But if this autobiography is our V minus the glosses, it is amazing that even before the attack of Justus Josephus prepared a long apologetic account which included precisely those elements he would later need in his self-defense. Therefore it has been suggested that the original autobiography was a short work consisting mostly of information on Josephus' background and family. The frame of our V is a remnant of this alleged edition (V 1-27 and 414-430). A few years later, in order to respond to Justus, Josephus expanded his earlier work in order to produce an apologetic and polemic. But this suggestion does not solve our problem (why is the polemic against Justus so easily separable from the text?), and is intrinsically implausible (why did Josephus not write a separate retort to Justus if his autobiography were already complete?) as well as chronologically difficult (Agrippa probably died before 93/4 and so there is no reason to postulate two different editions of V).

What is the nature of this hypothetical common source? The least uncertain thing about it is that it was arranged chronologically much like V. If it was a literary work, a polished account like, say, that of Nicolaus of Damascus, we must explain why there are so many discrepancies between V and BJ, many more than between AJ 15-16 and BJ 1. Some of these, no doubt, are Josephus' response to Justus (see chapter five below). but many are too picayune to be of any significance. It is apparent that Josephus' memory, in addition to this written source, must have played a large part in both V and BJ. Thus we need a document fixed enough to have a definite order but free enough to allow remarkable divergences caused by shifts in memory. The most likely candidate is a hypomnema, a dry sketch or outline of the events in Galilee, which Josephus prepared before writing BJ. CA 1.50, "when my entire narrative was prepared" may well refer to this sketch. Ancient historians were expected to prepare such hypomnemata before proceeding to their literary works. BJ, a rhetorical history, drastically shortened, thematically rearranged, and freely modified the hypomnema. V, a hasty polemic and apologetic, retained the scope, structure, and, in general, the dryness of the original but added anti-Justus material (including the "glosses") and extensive self-defense. A similar theory has been advanced to account for the differences between the Vita Constantini and the sections parallel to it in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius. The one, a biography, and the other, a history, describe events of Eusebius' own lifetime but disagree on many details and on the order of events. Perhaps these two works derive from a Eusebian hypomnema.

We cannot now determine the exact content and form of this work. Josephus has rewritten everything not only because this was his normal procedure (see chapter two), but also because the hypomnema was meant to be rewritten.[p. 81 - 83]

stephan huller · 07-15-2012, 04:38 PM

On the synergoi who are credited in various places with 'fixing' the writings of Josephus:

Quote:

Then, in the leisure that Rome afforded me, with all my materials in readiness, and with the aid of some assistants for the sake of the Greek, at last I committed to writing my narrative of the events. [Contra Apionem book 1, 50, (p.183 of the Loeb)]

When you put all the details together it becomes easy to accept the idea that the 'synergoi' = the second century author of the text perhaps from the point of view of a third or fourth century attempt at 'bringing out' Josephus more prominently as a guarantor of the reliability of the information.

Duke Leto · 07-15-2012, 05:43 PM

Thank you for laying that out coherently. Your previous posts would lead one to think that anyone who was familiar with Shaye Cohen's scholarship, knew of the synergoi and so on would instantly conclude that your reconstruction of an outline or source in Aramaic translated and expanded into Greek in the 2nd century was the correct and most obvious one.

It isn't. Cohen's hypothesis of an author gradually rewriting his own work as time goes on and always restarting from the same outline is simpler.

It doesn't force you to answer the question of WHY a Christian forger of the 2nd Century would bother. What are they gaining? Why aren't they adding the Gospel narratives and more of Acts? Who is this supposed to convince?

I'm not going to stop asking until you give me an intelligible answer and I assure you no one but the terminally stupid will take this idea of yours at face value until you can.

As to the author writing in the 3rd person being proof of a ghost writer, I suppose you will be going on to prove that Aulus Hirtius is the writer of the entirety of the Gallic Wars?

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07-15-2012, 04:08 PM	#122
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	I don't know what kind of 'proof' you were expecting but I thought 'the tenth year of Antoninus' being in two different witnesses identifying a chronology of Josephus/Hegesippus dated to that year is pretty fucking impressive. Short of discovering the original manuscript that's a pretty good start. Most people have been working on the 'Testamonium Flavianum' angle arguing that it is a later Christian insertion into a first century text. My explanation is better than that which puts me into the elite rankings of Josephan scholarship ... until of course someone comes up with a better explanation. I could if I wanted put this argument into a paper and have it published somewhere. I just can't be bothered. If you'd like to debate the merits of my book, by all means start a thread and I bet I can convince you that its central premise isn't as unreasonable as it might seem. I bet half the reason you've stopped attacking me is that you've come to realize there really is something to this second century dating of Josephus's History of the Jews. I can do the same with respect to the Real Messiah. I just hate being predictable. I hate pushing an agenda but I am always willing to explain. The point here at least is that there was a chronology, dated to the 'tenth year of Antoninus' and alternatively identified as being by 'Flavius Josephus' or 'Hegesippus.' It was written by a Christian and IMO it was designed to counter the original chronology of Justus of Tiberias which was a first century witness to the events of 70 CE. Not surprisingly no longer exists. The reason the History of the Jews was reworked was because it made Acts look bad. It made it clear that Acts was written post 150 CE. The author of this 'History of the Jews' couldn't have known that his work would be cited in a text which became the official history of the Christian Church. Unfortunately for him and the original work, it became necessary to cut the 'Josephus reporting on Josephus' which still appears in various sections of the Latin text of Hegesippus. Indeed what few people notice - if memory serves me correct - is that when the Latin text of Jewish War cites the Testimonium Flavianum it appears as one of those 'Josephus on Josephus' moments.

07-15-2012, 04:25 PM	#125
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	But there is no Josephus to summarize. That's what your not getting. Hegesippus = Josephus. It was just a convenient way of obscuring the Josephus on Josephus angle of the original text - or better yet - the fact that the original author was writing from the second century. This is critical. This appears in critical sections of the Latin Jewish War when Josephus the first century Jew appears. The author inexplicably speaks about Josephus in the third person - not just in the Latin text - but traces of the original material make their way even to the 'standard' Greek text that everyone celebrates as a first century text. This use of the third person is best explained by the original text being written at some distance from the events in question and by someone other than Josephus the first century Jew. It is precisely for this reason that the synergoi were invented. Have you found references to the concept of the synergoi in Josephus yet?

07-15-2012, 04:31 PM	#127
stephan huller Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: seattle, wa Posts: 9,337	Here's a summary in John Dominic Crossan: http://books.google.com/books?id=AsP...%20war&f=false Cohen noticed the parallels underneath various texts of Josephus and posited the existence of this ur-text.

07-15-2012, 05:43 PM	#130
Duke Leto Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 3,387	Thank you for laying that out coherently. Your previous posts would lead one to think that anyone who was familiar with Shaye Cohen's scholarship, knew of the synergoi and so on would instantly conclude that your reconstruction of an outline or source in Aramaic translated and expanded into Greek in the 2nd century was the correct and most obvious one. It isn't. Cohen's hypothesis of an author gradually rewriting his own work as time goes on and always restarting from the same outline is simpler. It doesn't force you to answer the question of WHY a Christian forger of the 2nd Century would bother. What are they gaining? Why aren't they adding the Gospel narratives and more of Acts? Who is this supposed to convince? I'm not going to stop asking until you give me an intelligible answer and I assure you no one but the terminally stupid will take this idea of yours at face value until you can. As to the author writing in the 3rd person being proof of a ghost writer, I suppose you will be going on to prove that Aulus Hirtius is the writer of the entirety of the Gallic Wars?

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