Roger Pearse

A useful reference. However just to qualify this, Whealey's book is not an evaluation of the question of the authenticity of the TF, but rather a study on the history of scholarship on the Testimonium. As such she indicates what the state of the academic consensus was at various points, and what it is now. One of the points she makes is the near-unanimous agreement for around 2 centuries (up to 1900) that the TF was entirely an interpolation; and that this consensus broke up during the 20th century under the influence of further manuscript discoveries and the general depoliticisation of the subject during that period.

A better source for a review of the entire question of authenticity of the TF is J. Carleton Paget's article in the JTS 52 (2001). In this he reviews all the arguments pro and con. They all suffer from being inconclusive, unfortunately.

I'm not sure that many if any scholars, Ken Olson aside, would use the term 'forgery', which is somewhat loaded, at least to me. If the entire passage is inauthentic, this can come about in a number of ways, few of them involving intentional fraud. Unless evidence of fraud can be produced, I would suggest that it's best not to suggest it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Doug Shaver

Assume for the sake of discussion that:
1. Josephus did not write it.
2. It was inserted by Christian copyists.

Why is "forgery" not the right word, and what do you think would be a better word?

Toto

IIDB can hardly decide such a thing. Here is a thread from 2004 and you can find others if you want. I and other posters here have been impressed by the arguments of Ken Olson (Check his blog for some linkss; he is writing his PhD thesis on the question.)

Roger Pearse

Things find their way into texts that are hand-copied in quite a number of ways. The usual term for a piece of text that has arrived in the text in this way is 'interpolation' or 'gloss'.

Here is one method that covers the point. But remember, there may be many others.

Hand-copying is prone to certain kinds of errors. One of the more common is for the eye to skip a bit. When the scribe (or the Corrector) spots this, the missing bit is usually written in the margin next to where it should go; or between the lines. A mark may or may not indicate the insertion point.

Margins are wide. People writing comments also write these in the margins, or between the lines.

When the text comes to be copied, the copyist has to decide whether the marginal note is part of the text or not. There is, in fact, nothing to guide them. They are human; they may be tired, cold, hungry, and thinking of something else.

Thus a marginal note can sometimes become part of the text, without anyone making a conscious decision at all.

Scribes are fairly determined to make a complete copy. If something is present in the manuscript, it will most likely get copied. How else did scribes who didn't know Greek copy bits of Greek text in classical texts? Indeed how else did illiterate scribes copy manuscripts?

A text about first century Judaea is quite possibly going to get a note in the margin about Jesus at some point passing down the monastic years. The rest is more or less inevitable.

This, indeed, is no doubt how the TF found its way into one class of manuscripts of the Jewish War. Someone copied it into the margin; the next scribe took it for part of the text.

In the interests of balance, I ought to add that people do sometimes interpolate deliberately. Even then this may be innocent; they believe that they are correcting a defective text. But it can be done with intent, and the most famous example would be the forged decretals. This was a genuine collection of papal laws which was interpolated by someone in Southern France during the Dark Ages with additional canons. All of these tended to increase the power of the Pope (who was far away) at the expense of the local authorities (who were probably rather in the face of the interpolator). The interpolator must have known that what he was doing was to forge things. Legal instruments did tend to get forged in the middle ages, as indeed has been known to happen today.

Likewise at the renaissance the opponents of the union of Florence were not above forging some references in copies of the Greek fathers to sabotage advocates of reunion such as Bessarion.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

jackal5096

Ignatius knew of Docetists. Does that count?

Minimalist

I don't know, Chris. Perhaps you see something in that exchange that I don't?

Huon

From the page "Marcionites" of the Catholic Encyclopedia :
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09645c.htm

Perhaps too late ?

Gamera

I think the gist of this thread is: If a Christ-mythicist movement existed at some point in antiquity, why are there no direct unambiguous references to it, the way we have direct unambiguous references to the pharisees and other Jewish sects.

The claim that the entire body of mss that might have directly mentioned such a movement were doctored or destroyed seems strained to say the least.

Chris Weimer

Did you read what I quoted?

gurugeorge

LOL. Bingo. W. Bauer's "Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity" demonstrates that generally speaking, by its own admission, proto-orthodoxy seems always to arrive on a scene when there are already (from its point of view) "heretical" forms of Christianity. The proportion of pre-existent "heretical" Christianity to proto-orthodoxy may be debatable (and may not be as great as Bauer suggested - he had proto-orthodoxy as a really minor form of Christianity at first, almost starting from scratch) but Bauer's general idea is sound (and is accepted even by some orthodox scholars like Bart Ehrman).

Elsewhere on this board I've sketched an outline that goes from "mythical" (what I think was actually proto-Gnostic) Christianity through Gnosticism to "Docetism" (the remnants of Gnosticism at a time when orthodoxy had triumphed politically). As this form of Christianity declines, proto-orthodoxy rises and becomes orthodoxy. (Two curves that intersect, sort of, although it's more complicated than that: the rising curve of proto-orthodoxy is a political taking-over of the broad Christian movement, while the proto-Gnostic-Gnostic-Docetic declining curve is a curve of transformation of a belief from one variegated class of beliefs - purely spiritual, mythical, spiritual with mythical "historical" components - through to a position that accepts the orthodox strongly-historical Jesus, but retains a strong emphasis on the spiritual nature of the Christ.) As I say in my other posts, the signature balancing act of orthodox theology, between a spiritual and fleshly Christ (neither being allowed to be denied, but neither being allowed to be the only kind of Christ) was necessitated by its having to keep on board believers in both Jewish Christian Christs and Gnostic Christian Christs, while maintaining at the same time some degree of spiritual affiliation itself, and keeping enough historicity to sustain the authority of its "apostolic succession".