mountainman

Thanks Minimalist. Have you, or anyone else,
seen in their travels in books by authors in the
field of BC&H and/or ancient history, the express
statement that the Testimonium Flavianum is, to their
assessment .... "completely inauthentic.,
who are not already included on the list below
of 26 authors:


Lardner,
Harnack,
Schurer,
Gordon Stein.
Author of CMU,
Arthur Drews,
David Taylor,
Wells, JM
Bishop Warburton "a rank forgery, and a very stupid one, too",
Remsburg,
Rev. Dr. Giles,
Rev. S. Baring-Gould,
Cannon Farrar,
Theodor Keim,
Rev. Dr. Hooykaas ,
Dr. Alexander Campbell,
Dr. Chalmers,
Lee Strobel (NOTE: See comments),
Charles Templeton,
Freke and Gandy,
Earl Doherty,
Marshall Gauvin ("[the TF] .. did not exist." ),
Edwin Johnson,
Jakob Burckhardt ??
Jay Raskin

*** Rowcount 26

EarlDoherty

One important older scholar who has been overlooked is Charles Guignebert. In "Jesus", p.18, during a discussion covering a few pages, he says:

"It seems probable that Josephus did not name Jesus anywhere; that the Christians--and perhaps the Jews also, for a different reason--were very early surprised and pained by this silence, and did their best to recetify it by various glosses, at various times and in various places, of the different manuscripts of the Jewish chronicler."

He also rejects any authentic base for the Slavonic text, and rejects Robert Eisler's contentions about it, just "recently" published when Guignebert wrote this book.

He does not suggest any idea that Eusebius was the forger, but he rather lamely suggests the reason why Josephus did not write about Jesus was that he did not think "the movement...worthy of attention, since it had, in fact, occupied only an insignificant place in the Jewish history of his day."

Earl Doherty

mountainman

*** Rowcount 27

Thanks Earl, and also for the source reference, a timely reminder
that to do the "proper job" on this list we probably need to have
author, publication, page ref, and their argument and/or summary.
I have noted this requirement. It is on my to-do list.

However in the meantime, if anyone has this data at their fingertips
in regard to anyone of the 27 authors, and has a moment to spare,
please consider posting the data to this thread, and I will gather
it up in the not-too-distant-future.

Best wishes,


Pete

Cege

I agree that if Christ was recognised as the Messiah by Josephus he would have written much more. Much more! Other figures in the Jewish "Histories" were given much more comment than what is claimed that Josephus wrote about the Jesus of the NT.

When I was answered by a Sunday School teacher that a contemporary source, Josephus, mentioned Jesus of the NT, I was sadly disappointed when I researched what little Josephus might have said. And that probably Josephus hadn't even given passing acknowledgement of the figure Jesus, but the comment that survivied was probably added by Christian/s editing in later years.

Minimalist

Acharya S, in The Christ Conspiracy, mentions a Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity as subscribing to the total forgery school of thought.

Doug Shaver

I think debates about whether the entire testimonium can be proven inauthentic are a waste of time. It is essentially certain that at least some of it is. The "residue" is therefore, at best, only possibly authentic. Absent a powerful argument for believing that Josephus wrote the residue, it is worthless as evidence for anything.

And, I have never seen anything like a cogent argument for an authentic residue. The best that any apologist has ever come up with is "We don't know for sure that Josephus didn't write some of it."