Solo

My point is that once you admit a fraudulent manipulation in the passsage, you have no choice - if you are a serious investigator without a bias to an opinion - but to set aside the whole passage. The reason is that have no way of knowing how the passage was manipulated. You only know - or agreed it is reasonable to conclude - that the Testimonium of Josephus was tainted. Everything else then is idle speculation by driven at best by wishful thinking willing to overlook a fraud.

Jiri

jgoodguy

Is it really true that if you have a forgery, you must without exception set it aside. If so, please provide some experts that say this is true with regard to ancient history.

The wiki reads:

That does not sound as if forgery is an automatic flush.

also

Again I see no indications of an automatic flush.

Lets flip the question, can we prove the Testimonial is a forgery? The short answer is there is no direct evidence that it is. It is questionable that Josephus would write it the way it is written but that is a inference and not primary evidence. We do not have anything but the plain text of the Tesimonial as evidence and to assert that it is a forgery needs to impeach the plain text.

I find the idea of eliminating literature on the basis of forgery, rather odd. Tossing interpolation in as a forgery, there are forgeries in all Christian Literature, and if forgery is all bad and we must eliminate anything with a hint of forgery then all Christian Literature can be eliminated. Why limit the damage to a passage when any passage could be forged.

andrewcriddle

You may be right in this particular case that the TF is too problematic to use as evidence for anything.

It seems a little extreme to claim that we can never recover an earlier version of a deliberately modified text on the basis of internal evidence.

Andrew Criddle

avi

I am concerned about the oldest extant copy of Josephus' text that we possess.

I am also concerned that Eusebius quotes from TF, indicating its existence in the fourth century, and yet, a century earlier, Origen does not quote from TF, instead quoting from other texts written by Josephus.

Surely, such a statement, as found in TF, had it existed in the third century, would have been quoted, supported, or refuted, by Origen....

Do I err here?

avi

Toto

That would be around the 10th century.

I think you are correct.

Juststeve

Is anyone here arguing that all of the TF is authentic to Josephus? I don't think so and such a position is not necessary for a secular person to maintain that an HJ existed.

What we seem to have from at least one myther is the rather absurd notion that if any part of the TF is an interpolation then all of it must be disregarded. That is certainly not how we ordinarily deal with other evidence. Is that the myther position, if part of the TF was added by a Christian Scribe we should disregard the whole?

Steve

Steven Carr

If your dollar bill says 'Bank of Toytown' but otherwise looks OK, should we disregard all of it as counterfeit?

If bits of a painting still have paint which is wet on it, should we accept the dry bits as genuine?

Toto

If I show you that the position is held by scholars with advanced degrees who are not "mythers" will it become less absurd?

It is the position of Steve Mason, author of Josephus and the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk), who accepts the validity of the mention of James the Brother of Jesus in Ant 20.

There are cases where scholars think they can separate out an interpolated phrase or passage, leaving a trustworthy core. But the Christian elements in the TF are extensive, and the reconstructed version is speculative, at the very least. The entire TF breaks the flow of the surrounding text, and introduces a subject that Josephus would not be expected to write about.

Solo

The question here is controls, Andrew. Sure, I can image a scenario where a trivial insert or modification could be isolated from the body of the text relatively painlessly in a way that leaves no substantive doubt as to the geniunness of the restoration. But that would not be the case where a whole passage is claimed to have been inserted out of context (as the critics of the TF protested since the Rennaissance), and it looks like a strikingly self-evident fraud.

Best,
Jiri

Juststeve

Perhaps a parallel situation is one I confront often in preparing medical negligence cases. We often have reason to think that a record may have been altered in light of a bad outcome, but I have never supposed that because something had been added or deleted the remainder of the record is unreliable. I would think it entirely unreasonable to conclude that because I think the record of first administration of oxytocin was altered the rest of the record of labor was false as well.

Just an example.

Steve