Lucretius

I have been thinking about the original post a little and basically have two questions regarding Josephus,Tacitus ,Pliny and Suetonius .
First of all how would they have known if the person they "knew" was a "Christ mythicist" ?
Secondly given the Greek/Roman attitudes to religion in general would they have even cared ?
In the second one I am basically refering to the fact that that in both Greek & Roman mythologies there are Demi Gods such as Hercules (son of a god ) and the fact that the "deification" of Emperors seems to have been readily accepted.
The very fact that the Romans in particular were prepared to accept all sorts of other "cults" into their religious culture providing it did not contradict existing myths without actual "physical proof " of the actual existence of say Isis for example would make me think that in their "mindset" they wouldnt even bother to ask if this Jesus character really existed in fact the may have seen this whole "physical existence" question as completely irrelevant.
It is perhaps a uniquely Judeao-Christian idea that the Messiah should have existed as a physical human being .

angelo

It's a tragedy that intelligent people period believe and grasp such obvious fabrications. Blind Freddy can see that it's an interpolation.

Minimalist

How would they handle the obvious follow up question, though. If there were real historical references to Jesus, why fraudulenty concoct others?

I always figured that by the time Constantine handed them real power they suddenly realized that their god did not make a ripple on the pages of history and so set out to correct this stunning void in the record. "Faith" in any religion has never let "Fact" hamper it.

aa5874

And in addition, neither Pliny, Suetonius or Tacitus gave any physical description of this Chretus or Christ. A person cannot independently read each passage fron any of the mentioned writers about Christ and get any historical facts about this figure. These passages are of little or no use to contradict the myth of Jesus.

On the other hand, the 'TF' is practically a confirmation of the myth of the resurrected one.

spin

Calling things "fraudulent" puts you into the position of showing that they are fraudulent.

If one looks at the second reference to Jesus in Josephus, it is in a brief passage about a certain James, a passage known by Origen, but a careful reading of Origen shows what that writer actually found in the text. (See this earlier post by me.) About the only guaranteed thing that Origen got from the text was a reference to the demise of James.

However, Origen's comments would have been sufficient to warrant for marginal comment on the text of Josephus by someone who knew Origen's efforts. This in turn is sufficient to stimulate the inclusion of the marginal comment in the body of the text as an omission reinserted. This would make the insertion a natural process that no-one could seriously call "fraudulent".

Some efforts may indeed have been fraudulent, when a scribe may have seen that a writer should have mentioned Jesus but didn't. However, it would be hard to label marginalia creeping into a text fraudulent.

Even the supposed Neronian persecution which has crept into Tacitus's Annals may well have been a developed persecution tradition included with the text as a christian explanation of what was later believed to have happened in the time of Nero and which was later taken as veracious.


spin

Minimalist

The TF appears suddenly in all its glory in Eusebius. Neither Origen nor any other pre-Eusebius writer mentions anything about it.

I'm comfortable with the word "fraudulent."

spin

It seems that you are implying one trajectory for the TF, which may in fact be correct, but you have no means of verifying it, so the trajectory is nothing more than an unsupported hypothesis. One usually needs something tangible on which to base a fraud claim.


spin

the_cave

Spin, the point is that without direct evidence of an interpolation (a copy of Antiquities without the TF, for example) then we are speaking in terms of degrees of evidence. Everyone agrees there are inconsistencies in assuming that the TF is authentic. The question then becomes, what is the best explanation? If two explanations (for example: the TF is interpolated vs. some elements of the TF are interpolated) explain the evidence equally, and if both are equally plausible (which really they are) then there is no basis for making a decision besides other criteria or background assumptions (like "interpretive frameworks", as Vork has pointed out). In fact you could argue that authenticity is the fallback position, since it has been held the longest and is held by the most experts. (In other words, it is the null hypothesis).

None of this is to argue either for or against authenticity (I have my own opinions anyway). But it's not obvious that arguing for partial authenticity is a prima facie bogus strategy.

As an example, I can offer a third explanation for the TF: Joesphus didn't write the Antiquities; someone else did. Why? B/c the TF obviously wasn't written by Josephus. Therefore the rest wasn't, either.

"But no," you say, "If you remove the TF from Josephus that solves the problem."

"Oh pooh-pooh," I reply, "You're just picking the specks out of the sandwich. Haven't you ever heard of Occam's Razor?"

See how easy that was?

spin

In AJ 18.65 we read that "At this same time another outrage put the Jews in uproar". In order to make sense of the linguistic indications of literary cohesion, what other outrage regarding the Jews is being referred back to?

I asked another question which you have side-stepped, one regarding epistemology. To have a meaningful ontology, you must have a functional epistemology.

All strategies are bogus until one does the footwork to show their relevance.

Deep.

I think you need to read what has been written on the topic.


spin

the_cave

Maybe the original version of the TF? (Now lost to us.) Do you really think that's impossible? If Josephus were refering to the crucifixion of a Jewish prophet sympathetically, we don't need to assume that this means he was a Christian! (Out of curiosity, is "outrage" really the best translation here, and why?)

I did answer the question: I said authenticity was the null hypothesis. Now, you're not satisfied with that, because you want to start all over again from first principles. Ok, fair enough, we can do that, but then the onus is on you to provide your own epistemology. Why shouldn't I, for example, go all the way and ask if anything in Josephus happened the way he said it did? Are there any passages that haven't been tampered with? If we're going to start all over again, why not make as many sandwiches as we want? What's the point at which we stop and say "We know we haven't gone too far?" (I'm asking because I want to know!)

Believe me, I have--especially considering I've been a part of many of those discussions here!