Amaleq13

IIRC, Josephus uses it elsewhere in reference to either Elisha or Elijah.

aa5874

It may have a 'wondrful thing' for a Jew to kill Roman soldiers during the 1st century. Jesus of Sapphat, in War of the Jews, may have done some wonderful things, he may have killed a few.

gurugeorge

Too subtle for me

To me the TF is an incorporated marginal gloss, by a fairly early Christian copyist, that's eventually primped and tweaked into what amounts to an interpolation by subsequent Christian copyists; someone/some people pretending to be the Jewish historian. It just looks obviously like that: To me the "flow" argument trumps all the anal textual examination of the TF - although that might show some "layering" of the TF that's interesting in itself.

i.e., unless you consider that Jesus' advent, despite the glowing terms in which it's described, was "a calamity that befell the Jews", then it's probably a marginal gloss that got incorporated into the text and tweaked a bit over time. Something similar for the "James" reference (I think the reference may have originally been to a brother of the Jesus son of Damneus mentioned at the end, but it was tweaked a bit to make it look like it was about the Christian Jesus).

These were probably the only two places in Josephus' timelines where there might feasiblyhave been mentions of Jesus, had he existed, so naturally they were filled in by zealous Christians. Just a "white lie".

I can't believe that people take these mentions seriously actually.

Jayhawker Soule

Sorry, gurugeorge, but but it's hard to tell whether your final comment refers to current scholarship or to your previous, convenient speculations.

gurugeorge

Har de har

Meh, I've been round the houses on it: when I first looked into it, it looked like an obvious interpolation, then as I got into the scholarly to-and-fro, I was quite impressed by some of the HJ scholarly defences for a while; but now I'm back to thinking it's an obvious interpolation. HJ scholarly discussions about the TF take on a sort of hallucinatory ambience with airy-fairy speculation built on airy-fairy speculation. But when you put down the historical Jesus bong and step back from the text, it just stands out like a sore thumb - like a big, fat, throbbing, Tom & Jerry thumb that's been hit with a giant hammer.

FWIW, Josephus clearly knew nothing of a historical Jesus.

That doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't one, but if there was he evidently didn't make a big enough splash at the time to come to Josephus' attention.

Doug Shaver

No, Doug would not say something so patently absurd.

Absent any shred of evidence to the contrary, I take it for granted that Josephus was Jewish and that he was a historian.

If the TF is authentic in its entirety, then a Jewish historian said something about Jesus that is remarkably inconsistent with his actually being a Jew. Perhaps stranger things have happened. However, if a plausible alternative is less strange, then we should believe the alternative.

In this case, the conventional alternative is that the extant TF is a doctored version of an original in which Josephus mentioned Jesus and said a few nice things about him. According to that scenario, those things don't sound Christian because a Christian did not write them.

I'm not done yet, but I'd like to pause at this point and ask whether you are with me so far. Do you have any problem with what I'm calling the conventional alternative? Do you think it reasonable to believe that the extant TF represents an altered original, or do you think it more reasonable to believe that Josephus wrote the entire TF as we now have it?

Roger Pearse

It's plausible enough. It sort of indicates the sort of problems that we all feel about the passage.

But my problem with this line of argument is that it is just that -- plausible. You see, I have a general problem with stating as fact that which appears plausible to me. The reason is that if I had a time machine and spent 5 minutes in the streets of Antioch in 73 AD, I would undoubtedly revise my ideas of what is 'plausible' out of sight. It starts to become an appeal to my expectations; and this would prevent me ever learning anything that I didn't already know. I feel that I would prefer to remain agnostic.

Incidentally we should remember that we're looking at Josephus with a perspective of 2000 years of Jewish-Christian animosity. It may not have been nearly so evident at the time, and there must have been people with a foot in both camps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

ynquirer

Well, the nineties are a terminus ad quem. Actually, Josephus was commander-in-chief of the Jewish armies in Galilee during the war against the Romans, that is, in the sixties. Galilee was an initial stronghold of Christianity (Mk 16:7). Those being, say, in their twenties or thirties when Pilate was a governor, would be in their sixties or even fifties thirty-five years afterward. Josephus there had opportunity to interview tens if not hundreds of such people.

Moreover, people in their fifties or sixties, who possibly might have seen Jesus personally, would be the elders of towns and villages thirty-five years later. Josephus’ War of the Jews frequently mentions the difficulties he met to levy men and collect money to boost the war effort. Jesus’ story, as told by those many people, would no doubt differ from person to person, but a core might conceivably have provided a political argument: “Those powerful tycoons in Jerusalem, who conspired with the Romans to give Jesus an unlawful death, now want us to sacrifice our children and money to wage a war on the same Romans for the sake of the Law? ¡No, thanks!”

andrewcriddle

Elisha in Antiquities 9:8:6 Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

What makes the phrase "ambiguous", then?