Sauron

Uh, no. That is the conclusion you'd like us to accept. But the evidence says that when he is shown contradictory evidence, then he will admit it.

I'm sorry; did you prove this? Where? I think you missed a step. I have seen no such goal, and you've clearly not demonstrated one. Back to square one for you.

Steven Avery

Does this apply to folks writing from a Christian perspective ? Or is this a one-sided discouragement only activated when the wrong oxes are gored ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto And charges of ideological motives are likely to blow back in your face..

When have the IIDB mods ever discouraged charges of ideological motives against myself or, more importantly, Christian writers and figures, living or deceased ? Or discouraged impugning their integrity.

Please show examples from the archives.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

judge

From Luke vs. Matthew on the Year of Christ's Birth by Richard Carrier (2006)

One wonders how an event in 4BCE following an eclipse on Sept 15* 5BCE (?) can be considered soon after



Is that really ususal to pull a lunar eclipse from several months previous and connect it with such an event and refer to the event as soon after?

Heck there was a lunar eclipse in March 5BCE also. I suppose Horod death was almost soon after that one as well?

*according to post #33 here.

Steven Avery

Josephus also mentions a lunar eclipse soon before Herod's death, and astronomers note there was such an eclipse in 5 B.C.E. and 1 B.C.E. Inerrantists therefore want Herod to have died in or shortly after 1 B.C.E. However, not only is all evidence against such a notion, but the Jewish Scroll of Fasting records the calendar day of Herod's death, and it preceded that of the eclipse of 1 B.C.E, but not that of 5 B.C.E. Since Josephus says his death followed (not preceeded) an eclipse, the eclipse Josephus mentions was probably that of the year 5. In the end, there is simply no evidence Herod died later than the year 4, and no plausible case to be made that he did.

Judge, the problems with Richard's rather offhand and confusing usage of the 'Scroll of Fasting' are even greater than you indicate. We might wonder why Richard doesn't give any actual dates, or any additional material.
A rather notable omission for the detail and footnote-oriented Richard Carrier.

You sniffed this one out well.
Apparently this evidence would work better against Richard's theories than for -

http://www.oxleigh.freeserve.co.uk/sstb.ch.16.htm
Seven Steps to Bethlehem - Arthur & Rosalind Eedle
THE MEGILLATH TA’ANITH

And in that "List of Commemorative Days", being 35 in number, are found explanations of why one should rejoice. For example, No.23 concerning Kisleu 25th we read, "Commencement of the eight days of the Purification of the Temple [i.e. Hannukah]. Mourning is forbidden." And so it is throughout all the 35 entries, together with their explanatory statements, with two exceptions . They are as follows:-

Entry 21 reads Kisleu 7. A Festival Day.
Entry 25 reads Shebat 2. A Festival Day. Mourning is forbidden.

Both of these dates have, at one time or another, been attributed to the death of Herod the Great. The reason why no description is given is attributed to the fact that when it was recorded, the events were within the memory of those alive. Whether this can be substantiated remains to be proved, but nevertheless, it is a very reasonable assumption to suggest that one of the dates coincides with the death of Herod. We can consult the Hebrew Calendar to find out when these dates fell in the years B.C. 5 to A.D. 2.
===
(Continues with graph and analysis, showing Dec 29, 1 BC eclipse date working well with 2nd Shebat, January 16, 1 AD death of Herod and no other dates matching the evidences.)

Why Richard Carrier would only allude vaguely to his evidence without giving the specifics is a puzzle. Upon closer examination it appears that he was involved in a facile analysis of convenience so it was better to keep the specifics aside. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Now we look to his response to your post and the graph and background and analysis at the SSTB site.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

judge

In addition to the problems with the eclipse.

Josephus himself seems to disagree with the exactness of this date.

1.According to DIO the battle of Actium was fought Sept 1-2 31 BCE Roman History.51.

2.Josephus tells us the battle of Actium coincided with the 7th year of Herods reign Wars 1.19.3

3. So if Herod reigned for 34 years this would mean he died in 3 BCE.

One could just as easily say the evidence of Herods death in 4BCE is a little difficult to be certain about.

judge

The Sept 15 5BCE eclipse suggested by Richard Carrier can also be ruled out by looking to the pontificate of Matthais. It is adetailed argument which can be found here The Lunar Eclipse of Josephus essential to say matthais's pontificate must have involved a period during which there was a day of atonement.
As this period was only 9 or 10 moths long it cannot have occurred in the 9 or 10 months preceding 15 sept 5BCE.

JoeWallack

JW:
The following is a Summary of why "Matthew" and "Luke" Contradict each other on the supposed year of Jesus' birth. The Key time markers are established by Josephus, the most famous historian of the applicable time period and generally considered an authority for the applicable time, place and people by everyone including Christianity.

Josephus:

--Herod the Great receives Kingdom

----AJ 14.389 & 14.487 & Appian BC 5.75

--Succession by Archelaus of Herod the Great

----AJ 17.191 & WJ 1.665

--Archelaus removed after ten years

----AJ 17.342

--Archelaus removed and Quirinius was made responsible for his
--territory at the time Quirinius was made Governor of Syria.

----AJ 17.354, 18.1, 18.26, 20.102

----Cassius Dio 55.27.6 (removal)

--Roman coins minted in Judea start around 6 CE which is when --Quirinius became Governor of Syria.

The next step is to match up any information from the birth accounts of "Matthew" and "Luke" that correspond to time markers found in Josephus.

Matthew:
1) Per "Matthew" Herod the Great was King when Jesus was born.

2) Per "Matthew" Archelaus succeeded Herod the Great as to part of the Kingdom when Herod the Great died.

Luke
1) Per "Luke" Jesus was born after Quirinius became Governor of Syria and started a Census.

Contradiction
Using Josephus as a Time reference "Matthew" dates Jesus' birth before Archelaus succeeded Herod the Great while "Luke" dates Jesus' birth after Archelaus succeeded Herod the Great and had ruled for ten years.


JW:
The above takes Specific information from "Matthew" and "Luke" and Matches it Directly to Time Markers given by Josephus.

Now try making this Type of Summary from:

The Census of Quintilius Varus

Good luck.



Joseph

BIRTH, n.
The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Steven Avery

Hi Judge,

Notice an important difference between the Ernest Martin and Arthur Eedle presentations. While Martin has Schebat 2 (January 28th) in 1BC Eedle has the date a month earlier on our calendar, too early for the January 9, 1 BC eclipse. Eedle then goes almost one year further to the next eclipse.

In some cases I believe these writers can claim a precision not warranted. (Similar to the concerns that a precision for Josephus can be claimed that is not warrented, even putting aside issues such as inclusive counts and whether a day of a year might qualify as a full year.) Do they know e.g. for sure whether a month was derived by calculation or observation ? If by observation, as Karaites do today, you can have a one-day or even two-day variation from the later Hillel calculation model. Or an uncertainty from whatever we expect looking backwards, since we do not know visibility and cloud-cover on a particular day, Uncle Weatherbee having sometimes gone out for falafel and not marking the book. (Note that this alone can really undue the part of the Martin presentation that insists on the day of Purim not being possible for the execution, a section that was largely conjectural anyway .. rulers do weird, unexpected things all the time,and they can even be deliberately provocative or they could be demonically inspired as well.)

There is even the possibility of a different calculation/observation effecting a full month difference, which is commonly known as 'postponements'. Even now the Karaite calendar is sometimes a full month different from the traditional Orthodox Jewish calendar. Could something like this explain the Martin-Eedle difference ? Dunno, but it would be good to research. Notice also that in other cases they have a differences, too, such as in various exact days.

None of this, so far, could work to rehabilitate the Richard Carrier apparent misuse with vagueness and lack of precision of the "Scroll of Fasting" in his article. And the real problem the Megillath Ta’anith apparently actually creates for his preferred scenario.

However, it does call us to keep our dollup of caution handy in looking at each and every proposed chronology.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

JoeWallack

JW:
My previous post here demonstrated just how clear the Birth Dating error in the Christian Bible is. The argument for error has every significant assertion Clearly supported by Direct ancient witness.

One of the assertions for error here is that Herod the Great died in 4 BCE. Judge has questioned this assertion based on a textual variation in Josephus concerning the timing of Philip's reign.

Richard Carrier's related article is not only saying that error here is Likely but that it is certain. Therefore, he has an obligation to consider any possible defense that has potential to be reasonable, even if it can not be Likely.

Before I present the relevant excerpt from Carrier's article let me give some helpful background. Carrier is specifically dealing with an attempted defense here by Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, rev. ed., 1998. Finegan's assertion that Herod the Great did not die in 4 BCE is based in part on David Beyer's paper/talk, "Josephus Reexamined: Unraveling the Twenty-second Year of Tiberius," delivered at the annual national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1995. Beyer claims to have examined manuscripts of Josephus and specifically looked at Textual Variation concerning the timing of Philip's reign (twentieth vs. twenty-second).

In order to clear up one source of confusion in this Thread, Carrier says that Finegan does not name the Manuscripts that Beyer looked at. Beyer does.

And now, without further adomini, here is Carrier's related excerpt without prejudice (for now). Enjoy!:


http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...ius.html#Herod

"Was Philip made king in 2 B.C.?

Apart from all this ad hoc assertion, Finegan's only 'case' for his hypothesized mass-coregency is an attempt to redate the reign of just one successor, Philip, according to an obscure textual variant (§ 218). He proposes that in Jewish Antiquities 18.106 "in the twentieth year of Tiberius" should be read as "in the twenty-second year of Tiberius," so that Philip's "thirty-seven year" reign would have begun in 2 B.C. (and thus, so the argument goes, Herod must have died then). The original basis for all this tinkering is the fact that Philip's obituary is indeed placed in Josephus' narrative seemingly around the year 35 or 36. But it is clear that Josephus wrote "twentieth" and not "twenty-second," and analysis shows that Josephus is either wrong about the dates of all the events he places in this year, or else he is compressing many years together, or both. It is therefore most likely that Josephus is correct about when Philip began his reign, just as he is with all the other tetrarchs, and simply misplaced (or loosely placed) his obituary among external Roman events he knew less well.

As evidence of Josephus' confusion about events, Cassius Dio dates the Vitellian parley, which Josephus places before Philip's death, to the reign of Caligula, several years after Philip's death (59.17.5, 59.27.2-3). And it appears that Tacitus may have, too: Vitellius, as a future emperor, is an important person, yet the event is not recorded by Tacitus for the reign of Tiberius, while Tacitus' account of Caligula's reign is lost. Likewise, Tacitus (Annals 6.31) and Cassius Dio (58.26) both date the other Parthian events to 34/35, which Josephus places after 36/37. Thus, while Josephus dates the death of Philip as having happened "about the same time" as all these Parthian affairs (Jewish Antiquities 18.96-105), they did not happen in the same year. Indeed, it appears that the Parthian king Artabanus established his son Arsaces as ruler of Armenia in 33 or 34 A.D., not 36 as Josephus' narrative implies (s.v. "Artabanus" and "Armenia," Oxford Classical Dictionary). Since Josephus clearly did not have a good idea of when the surrounding events actually happened, or else is not discussing a single year at all, he is certainly being too vague to pinpoint an exact year when he says Philip's death happened "around" then. Likewise, right after Philip's obituary, Josephus says "around the same time" Herod and Aretas began to have a falling out, but the narrative of this event spans several years in a matter of a few paragraphs. Thus, very little can be concluded about the date of Philip's death from where Josephus has placed it in his narrative.

What about that obscure textual variant? Finegan's only source for this claim is a mysterious, unpublished speech given by David Beyer.[17.3] In Finegan's summary, he never identifies any actual manuscripts, and though Beyer names them he does not identify their relationship to other manuscripts or their known quality or origins. All Finegan (and Beyer) does is "count manuscripts" and argue that older manuscripts are the most reliable. But neither is true, as any palaeographer knows. We have no way of knowing which of the manuscripts Beyer counted were copies of other extant manuscripts (and thus completely irrelevant to the question), and we have no idea whether the manuscripts he looked at are known to be reliable or unreliable or to what degree or in what ways. Older manuscripts can sometimes be poorer than new manuscripts, since newer ones can be based on even older but more reliable archetypes (see "On Calvinist Scorn of Textual Criticism" for more about textual analysis), and older ones may stem from especially faulty textual traditions. Moreover, Beyer examined only manuscripts in the British Museum and the Library of Congress--yet the best manuscripts are in France and Italy--one of which is the oldest, Codex Ambrosianae F 128, inscribed in the 11th century (the oldest manuscript Beyer examined was 12th century); and another is the most reliable: Codex Vaticanus Graecus 984, transcribed in 1354; both confirming a reading of "twentieth," and thus invalidating all his conclusions from the start. Finegan and Beyer seem ignorant of all of these issues. Consequently, we cannot trust them here.

When, instead, we examine all existing critical editions of Josephus, composed by scholars (Niese, Naber, and Thackeray) who themselves looked at the manuscripts, and properly, identifying relationships among them and assessing their reliability, we find a very different story. First of all, little more than a handful of manuscripts are worth even examining for this passage--yet Beyer is counting dozens (none of which are even among the best), proving that his investigation is completely disregarding the proper criteria of textual analysis. Second, all scholarly editions agree: the word for "twentieth" (eikostô) exists in all extant Greek manuscripts worth considering. Where does the reading "twenty-second" come from? A single manuscript tradition of a Latin translation (which reads vicesimo secundo). Beyer's case completely falls apart here. The Latin translations of Josephus are notoriously inferior, and are never held to be more accurate than extant Greek manuscripts, much less all of them. Indeed, this is well proven here: whereas the Latin has 22 for the year of Tiberius, it also has 32, or even in some editions 35, as the year of Philip, not the 37 that Finegan's argument requires. Thus, clearly the Latin translator has botched all the numbers in this passage. Any manuscripts that Beyer examined were no doubt either from these inferior Latin manuscripts, or Greek translations from these Latin manuscripts. Therefore, there is no basis whatever for adopting "twenty second" as the correct reading. Philip was crowned in 4 B.C. exactly as Josephus says, and just as all the other tetrarchs were who inherited portions of Herod's kingdom. This means Herod died in 4 B.C., exactly as Josephus claims."

"[17.3] David Beyer, "Josephus Reexamined: Unraveling the Twenty-second Year of Tiberius," delivered at the annual national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (Finegan incorrectly calls this the Society for Biblical Literature), on November 19, 1995. But for some mysterious reason, this paper was not published in the Society of Biblical Literature 1995 Seminar Papers (ed. Eugene H. Lovering, Jr., Scholars Press: Atlanta, Georgia), which otherwise reproduces the speeches given at the same meeting. The editor's introductory note (p. ix) reveals a problem right away with using Beyer's presentation the way Finegan does: the papers given at the meeting are "experimental and initial research on a subject. Therefore they should not be considered finished works but works in progress." I subsequently found Beyer's paper in Vardaman, ed., Chronos, Kairos, Christos II, and Beyer says little more than Finegan does on this subject."



Joseph

'Bhwallsheet. Bhalowchob." - Bluto

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Johann_Kaspar

It is not difficult at all. It is only difficult to deal with someone's prejudice. If Actium happened in the 7th year of Herod's reign, then his death in 4 BCE happened in his 34th year of reign.

Now if there are problems to understand Josephus, it is not because he is not reliable, it is because he was tampered by the xian scribes. All over the texts when it come to the crucial years.

But the most important thing is that Josephus gives evidence that he was completely ignoring the resurrection story of the so called Yeshua.

So what is your point by trying to put Herod's death later, except to display your prejudice? To reconcile Mt and Lk? There is not just one contradiction between the 2 texts. Try rather to understand why Yeshua is supposed to be born in Bethlehem. Because he is son of David? That is only a partial answer.