Toto

Gentlemen
At this point, a moderator should have stepped in and advised you to tone things down, avoid personalities, keep to the issues, etc. The topic here is Biblical Criticism and History, not the fascinating personal life of Stephan Huller.

But this is a welcome relief from the latest aa5874 vs Duvduv inanity.
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So please - just tone things down just a little. Thanks

maryhelena

And that, Stephan, reflects the motivation behind your crusade against the Josephan writer writing in the l st century - the Josephan picture of Agrippa II does not suit your theory about Agrippa II being a Jewish Messiah figure.

1) expelled from Jerusalem
2) his sending 2,000 'troops' to help Vespasian
3) Vespasian as a messiah figure
4) that scandalous rumor about an incestuous relationship with his sister Berenice.

Hardly the image of a Jewish Messiah figure! No wonder you want to discredit the Josephan writer - your theory demands it of you.....

stephan huller

I would love to have a discussion about Clement's reference in the Stromata but you Mary Helena are too demented for that and Sir Duke too lazy.

maryhelena

And the moderator just requested: "avoid personalities".....

And now I'm "too demented" and Duke Leto is now "Sir Duke" and is "too lazy".

:hysterical:

Toto

May I ask that Mary Helena and Stephan put each other on ignore? Nothing productive is going to come of this.

stephan huller

You insist on consistently bring up Agrippa as a motivation for reading what plainly appears on the page in Stromata 1.21 -

What on earth does this fucking sentence have to do with Agrippa. It is you and your moronic theory about the Herodian basis to the gospels that is the real issue. It is you who can't see beyond this. I am not bringing up the Herodian kings of Israel. You are. Because all you are is a stupid theory about the Herodians. I already went through my stupid theory about the Herodians phase four years ago.

stephan huller

Oops. Can't she just go away and bother Earl. I don't have anyone on ignore. It goes against my religious upbringing.

stephan huller

Fine I will put her on ignore.

stephan huller

I can get along with Duke Leto. I think we will eventually be friends.

Duke Leto

At this point I just feel the need to jump in make a quick review from the top.

You ONLY respond to the questions it pleases you to respond to, and ignore any that make your hypothesis difficult.

You're the one trumpeting an extreme (one man) minority view of the evolution of the Josephan texts. It's kind of incumbent on you to provide EXTREMELY conclusive proof of your hypothesis.

You ran into this thread shouting that you had proven Josephus was a forgery from the 2nd Century because the existence of the two Drusillas is an "obvious" indication that the Josephan author made up the latter from the former. That and the story is "stupid", in your opinion. You further claimed that there are 50 reasons for believing this.

You've been shown detailed evidence that there is definitely something wrong with the Drusilla in Tacitus. Did you read it? You've never even acknowledged it.

You've been asked to explain what the 2nd Century author or the Oral/Written Tradition he drew the Drusilla stories from hoped to convey to the reader with the other personal details in the Greek Text. People don't make up stories for no reason. The most response we've gotten out of you is for you to repeat your original assertion that it MUST be a forgery because it steals from Tacitus and you think it's a stupid story.

You were asked for some of the 49 other proofs. You blew it off.

Eventually you changed your line of attack to Clement quoting Josephus as apparently listing 147 CE as his own time, and Epiphanus attributing an identical quote to Hegesippus, thus "proving" that Josephus is the same as Hegesippus and wrote in 147 CE.

Once I understood the scenario I posited that it could just as easily be explained by 2nd Century Hegesippus quoting Josephus to establish the date of Moses relative to himself, and attributing the information to Josephus. Clement would then reproduce the number and absentmindedly attribute the entire calculation to Josephus, while Epiphanus would quote it and correctly attribute it to Hegesippus.

A perfectly reasonable scenario, and you have not even once bothered to acknowledge I suggested it.

You insisted that Hegesippus must be a corruption of Josephus because Hegesippus is not a real name. When shown that it is actually a perfectly legitimate Greek name held by a well-attested historical figure from long before the Christian era, you at least had the decency not to dispute something you obviously hadn't known, but instead of acknowledging your mistake you changed your argument to say that Jews didn't have Greek names. I presented the obvious example of Philo's family and asked on what grounds we should be certain Hegesippus was a Jewish convert since we have only Eusebius to go by. That too has never been answered.

I suggested that Pseudo-Hegesippus, being an obvious rework of Josephus, was originally labelled Josephus but "corrected" to Hegesippus by a Christian librarian who knew of Hegesippus but not Josephus, and assumed the latter must be a corruption of the former. Another plausible suggestion that you won't condescend to acknowledge.

You reconstructed a tentative chronology where Irenaeus put the Gospels in their final form by adding Josephus/Hegesippus material to Luke. I rightly pointed out that this scenario was implausible in the extreme owing to the fact that it would mean Irenaeus would be deliberately introducing the infancy narrative contradiction to the Gospels. You have never adequately responded to this point.

I requested a plausible reason why Eusebius, or whoever you think is responsible for the Greek text, would remove almost all the Christian material from Hegesippus before re-releasing it as Josephus when removing or rewriting only those passages that make it clear the author is Christian is the logical choice. No acknowledgement that it is even an obvious objection.

Finally I've demanded, multiple times, an explanation as to why Eusebius or whoever would try to pass off Hegesippus/Josephus' Greek Text as a genuine 1st Century history when anyone who reads it and the Gospels critically would see that the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are mutually exclusive. If you have control of the Greek Text and are removing all the Christian stories, moving Quirinius' census to Herod the Great's reign is the obvious thing to do. You won't even acknowledge the dimmest possibility that it's even a minor problem.

Now, you're changing the subject completely and insisting that only someone who has read and compared all the known versions of Josephus can possibly be qualified to criticize your theory. That's very convenient, because it basically limits the people who can tell you you're wrong to you, Shaye Cohen, and maybe 25 other living people. I know of exactly two living people who have read all the relevant primary source material related to my History thesis and neither of them is me because I couldn't go to England and I can't read the Elizabethan secretary hand very well.

Myself and several other people have raised numerous problems with your theory and you've done nothing to address them. We don't need to know everything about the subject, they are pretty common sense objections based on a conventional knowledge of generally accepted first century history and Gospel scholarship. If you write a book on this subject without coming to grips with these problems than the academic reviews are going to be pretty snarky, just like most of the reviews to your previous book were.

The claims you have made in this thread are very unorthodox and they require very convincing evidence to back them up. It seems that having made your hypothesis you've accepted it as proven and stopped looking for additional evidence, positive or negative.

As to my hostile accusations? Yeah, I was unnecessarily rude at the beginning of the thread. I'm going through legal problems related to my disability and I'm cranky, especially since I have nothing to do. You were also making, as in fact you still are, outrageous claims derived from very shaky evidence and I found it obnoxious. Since Toto has asked me to dial it back a bit via PM, I have been trying, VERY HARD, to listen to your arguments and respond to them seriously. You have not been making it easy.

And some of the accusations I've made are true.

The three users I named from the reviews of "Real Messiah" have reviews written by you or someone acting on behalf of you or your publisher. That's not an accusation, it's a transparent fact. You've never denied it.

It is not true that the Robert Price review was forged and I have apologized for saying it was. The inference is not unnatural given that at least three reviews are forged and the other products Price has reviewed are somewhat... unusual... choices for a Biblical scholar.

Maryhelena has shown that you have a very unusual view of the Herodian dynasty that requires an extreme level of unreliability in the Josephan text (and apparently a 2nd Century forger with a mint forging coins and inserting them in 1st Century hoards...). This puts your objectivity in dealing with the Josephan text's provenance under severe suspicion.

The comments thing was gratuitous. I did not actually think you were writing your own blog comments. It was meant to mock your assertion that "many people" also believe in a post 1st Century Josephus. Your pulling your blog hits in as an actual demonstration of the popularity of your ideas is slightly silly though. 250 unique visits a day is not a large number in the blogosphere. How many of these are your personal friends? How many are drawn in by Google and never come back? I myself have a dead blog that gets something like 40 no return hits a day to one old post that is in Google's top ten for an obscure topic. The question was more what percentage of the world agrees with Stephan Huller about Josephus? Since the comment you shared was about your new book's topic, I'd doubt it's as high as 90,000 out of 8 billion.

Stew on that, I need masturbation break.