Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi Apostate Abe,

Thank you for this response. This scenario that you give was actually the first one that I thought of. Eusebius simply felt differently about John the Baptist's purification than Josephus. I gave it a little thought and realized that it was silly.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi Apostate Abe,

Thank you for this response. This scenario that you give was actually the first one that I thought of. Eusebius simply felt differently about John the Baptist's purification than Josephus. I gave it a little thought and realized that it was silly.

Eusebius is going to state that John the Baptist baptized for sins and then he is going to refer his readers to the one historical source he has for John the Baptist that directly contradicts him and says that John baptized not for sins.

Imagine me saying "George Washington was not the first president of the United States. Here is a list of presidents on Wikipedia." When you go there it says that George Washington was the first president of the United States.

Or imagine someone saying, "There is no such thing as global warning. Go see the movie, "An inconvenient Truth"."

Or someone saying, "D.H. Lawrence never wrote about sex. He wrote the novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover"."

Or someone saying, "Rosario Dawson is really a man. Go see the movie "Alexander."

We may assume that Eusebius was insane for this to be the case, or we can more charitably say that he was drunk when he cited a source that contradicted his one statement about John the Baptist.

The problem is that we also have to assume the Origen was insane and/or drunk when he did the same thing, cited a source that directly contradicted his one statement on John the Baptist.

My theory does not rely on Eusebius being drunk or insane, but simply changing his mind on an important issue to himself. The issue of what John baptized for must have been important or it would not have been the most significant thing he mentions about John.

Thus we get this simple scenario that accounts for all the evidence in the simplest fashion.

Eusebius says John baptized for sins.
He interpolates the first lines about John in Josephus.

He is afraid that someone will catch his forgery, so he interpolates the same statements in Origen. (Note: also the discussion of John in Origen lacks sense in the position it is in) and he has Origen also citing Josephus in the exact way that he did, which proves that Origen saw it in Josephus. This is Eusebius' defense if anyone accuses him of forgery.

Later, because nobody, in fact has caught him, while writing his Church history, he goes to add the part about John baptized for sins. However he thinks about it, finds it theologically wrong and decides to say the opposite that John didn't baptize for sins.

Incidentally, it also seems to me that Eusebius, emboldened by the fact that nobody has caught his previous John forgery, adds the TF and even does a bit of tweaking of the James passage by adding (brother of the Lord) to help his theory that James was Jesus' brother).

Logically, this makes sense and is more reasonable to believe than that someone would cite a source against his own judgment about such an important issue. (Important because it is the one thing that Eusebius, Origen and Josephus says about John the Baptist - the meaning of his baptism).

As far as this being ad hoc, one might say that any deduction to the most logical choice is always ad hoc. In the movie, "the Maltese Falcon," it is hard to believe that Brigid O'Shaughnessy bumped off Sam Spade's partner Miles, as she is the most innocent looking of the desperate suspect that Sam meets. However, once he eliminates the other suspects, she is the only possible one left and so Sam can be sure that he is correct when he pins the murder on her, although he was not there to see it.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Originally Posted by Toto

You have barely touched the subject. You don't know what you don't know. That's a very dangerous position to be in.



And you assume that the reason he started his own journal was that other journals refused to publish his work? <facepalm>

Look at the references in Price's published works on theology.



It doesn't? Are earlier fictional works more likely to be historical??



No, it is not just as true.

.

This is unique, and wrong. But you need to be more specific, and perhaps write this up for a peer reviewed journal, since no one else seems to have made this argument. The alternate explanation is that earlier documents contain earlier theological views, which can become disfavored by later writers. This does not make the earlier views historically valid.



You will find that most NT writers engage in this sort of speculation, since there is hardly any real evidence.



Price is not writing a survey of all possible explanations (that would take an encyclopedia.) I don't find his treatment goofy, and he is hardly the only writer who has observed that Mark does not find the baptism by John to be embarrassing in the least.

Yes, everything in the Bible has a theological basis of some sort. It is, after all, a work of theology, of sacred literature.

If you claim to have read lots of posts in BCH, you seem to have missed the many threads that demonstrated that the criterion of embarrassment is useless for determining history. Most mainstream scholars have quietly abandoned it as its flaws have been demonstrated. And you will notice that scholars are careful to speak only of evidence of an "early tradition," not evidence of actual history.

In short, what seems embarrassing to Matthew was not embarrasing to Mark - but this is only evidence of their different viewpoints, not of an underlying bit of history.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I was a bit surprised to read you claim that you have not heard it, but, upon reflection, it seems to be something of my own creation, based on the arguments of others. For example, Price writes, as I quoted in the OP,

When you strip away the layers of edifying legend and controversial mythology, was Jesus baptized by John? A poll among New Testament scholars would no doubt yield a near-unanimous "yes" vote. The only item in the life story of Jesus considered equally secure is his crucifixion. And the reason for this is perfectly clear by now: the baptism was so embarrassing to Christians, both because it seems to subordinate Jesus to John and because it seems to cast Jesus as a repentant sinner, that the early church would never have fabricated it.

This is a statement of the criterion of dissimilarity. You can combine that with the "earlier is better" criterion.

Originally Posted by Abe

The conclusion that there was a historical core to the New Testament is not an arbitrary assumption; it follows largely from this pattern of the early Christian writings: later documents contain elements that are apparently favorable to Christians, early documents contain elements that are apparently not favorable to Christians, and there seems to be no good way to explain those unfavorable elements except with historical truth

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

.... For example, Price writes, as I quoted in the OP,

When you strip away the layers of edifying legend and controversial mythology, was Jesus baptized by John? A poll among New Testament scholars would no doubt yield a near-unanimous "yes" vote. The only item in the life story of Jesus considered equally secure is his crucifixion. And the reason for this is perfectly clear by now: the baptism was so embarrassing to Christians, both because it seems to subordinate Jesus to John and because it seems to cast Jesus as a repentant sinner, that the early church would never have fabricated it.

This is a statement of the criterion of dissimilarity. You can combine that with the "earlier is better" criterion.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I have read plenty of Ehrman, but also Van Voorst, much of the New Testament, about a third of Price's book, and thousands of posts in the BC&H.

Originally Posted by John Kesler

What parts of the NT did you determine were less important to read than "thousands of posts in the BC&H"?

Originally Posted by aa5874

...
This argument by Price is most absurd.

....

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Imagine me saying "George Washington was not the first president of the United States. Here is a list of presidents on Wikipedia." When you go there it says that George Washington was the first president of the United States.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Eusebius is going to state that John the Baptist baptized for sins and then he is going to refer his readers to the one historical source he has for John the Baptist that directly contradicts him and says that John baptized not for sins.

Imagine me saying "George Washington was not the first president of the United States. Here is a list of presidents on Wikipedia." When you go there it says that George Washington was the first president of the United States.

If that really seems unlikely to you, then consider that Origen and Eusebius were arguing against non-Christians, and Josephus was the only historical non-Christian source available who attests to John the Baptist. It was not central to their arguments that John baptized for the remission of sins. The central claim of the citation for Eusebius was that "John was a marvel to those who saw him." Origen takes a further step backward, and his central claim was "the existence of John the Baptist." They cited Josephus because they had almost no other choice. In my years of debate, I have seen sources abused by Christian apologists to a much greater extent. They have a name for it in the creation vs. evolution debates: quote mining. Quotes from evolutionary biologists and other scientists are taken from their original context to distort the meaning in favor of creationism. They trust that most of their readers will not check the original source and evaluate the intended meaning, and for good reason--their readers generally do no such thing. The behavior of Origen and Eusebius is somewhat analogous, though a little more forgivable--they don't imply that Josephus agrees with them on the details of John the Baptist. Your explanation is considerably more unlikely--we very much expect that an interpolation reflects the interpolator's interests, and the passage of Josephus plainly would not.