Originally Posted by aa5874

Your statements are just pure rhetoric. There is NO evidence that shows that the Jesus story was NOT wholly fabricated.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

I decided, just for the fun of it, to change my focus on the topic from a linguistic/syntactic argument to dusting off my books on Josephan analyses from a literary/rhetorical/stylistic point of view. I started this with Cohen, but dropped it there to concentrate on the nature of Greek syntax both within and outside of Josephus. Unfortuantely, a lot of the analyses which deal directly with the passage in question are ones that I'm sure are "suspect" because they concern the historical Jesus. But that still left several volumes.

More than one either contains a paper or was written by one of the recent major contributers to Josephan studies, Steve Mason (currently a professor of history at York University).

In his book Josephus, Judae, and Christian Origins Mason includes a chapter on Josephus' historical method which is relavent here because of some interesting comments he makes about Josephus' writing style and previous analyses of his quality as a historian. In particular, he addresses the frequency of criticisms of Josphan "inconsistencies in the form of outright contradictions, editorial seems, dobulets, parallel versions, and differential vocabulary..." (p. 108). Mason doesn't disagree that, from a stylistic and historiographic perspective, Josephus' works are often problematic: "Josephus has the authorial habit of repeating and controdicting himself, and of varying his terminology." (p. 112). Most of Mason's discussion concerns factual contradictions between or within works (and is largely a refutation of Schwartz), but he also notes other, more purely stylistic issues, such as "verbatim" repitition and awkward juxtaposition of passages. However, particularly noteworthy is Mason's description of Josephus' methods used to refer to people and places. After noting one such example in Life, Mason writes: "Elsewhere too, and commonly in Antiquities 18-19, he alternates the names of people and places, evidently for the sake of variety."

Mason's description of Josephus' preference for variety when referring to people (and places) coheres with Cohen's analysis I cited previously, as well as my own.

However, in the edited volume Making History: Josephus and Historical Method, Schwartz responds to Mason's critique of his work in his (Schwartz') contributing paper. He argues that Mason downplays the incongruities, name-changing, and contradictions, in particular citing Mason's reference to alternating names in 18-19, and pointing out that these are minor compared to the ones Schwartzs dealt with in his work.


All of this also coheres with the study of word order irrespective of time or genre. Dik, for example, followed her comprehensive 1995 account of word order in Herodotus with her 1997 monograph Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue, where she notes from the beginning that "Greek word order has traditionally been defined as free, or flexible, meaning that, besides a number of rules that can be described in syntactic terms, established categories of (especially) syntax cannot adequately account for the variation found in texts." (p. 4).

Of course, this is nothing other than what I had previously said, quoting Helena Kurzová. Bakker's monograph on the noun phrase in ancient Greek is just as explicit: "In contrast to most modern European languages, in which the ordering of NP elements is rather fixed, the structure of the NP in Ancient Greek is extremely flexible in that various consituents may occur in almost every possible order and that each constituent may or may not be preceded by an article. As a result of this flexibility, the number of possible NP patterns is enormous."

So both from a stylistic and linguistic standpoint, there is no reason to view the syntax of AJ 20.200 as somehow suspect. Mason, in his Josephus and the New Testament, follows most scholars in suspecting that the mention of Jesus reflects the fact that Jesus had been mentioned earlier, in the now corrupt AJ 18.63ff. However, he also writes that the phrasing "means to indicate something of the accusations brought against James: just as his brother was condemned by some Jewish leaders, so also James ran afoul of Ananus." He also notes that "Josephus' phrasing seems to reflect James' usual nickname. Paul calls him "the Lord's Brother (Gal. 1:19), from a Christian perspective, and this title distinguished him from the many others with the same name." (p. 178).

All of these suggestions are, of course, speculative. The variety of methods Josephus employs when referring to people render hazardous any analysis of the preposes refence modifier in AJ 20.200. But whatever the case, there is certainly no syntactical support for an interpolation argument.

Originally Posted by angelo atheist

Does he explain that we don't have any original manuscripts of Jo or any other writer of that time. That all of his works were handed down and copied more than 3-4 times in the following centuries, most probably by christian monks ?

Originally Posted by aa5874

Your statements are just pure rhetoric. There is NO evidence that shows that the Jesus story was NOT wholly fabricated.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

You negations are a bit ambiguous. Are you saying

~∃(x)Jx & ~Wx
or
~∃x(x)[Jx & ~Wx] ?

Or possibly ~∃x(x)[Jx & Wx] ?

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

Without a clear formal statement, it's hard to say refute what your are saying. It appears that you are saying there exists evidence which shows that the Jesus story is whole fabricated. But, as anybody with a basic familiarity with logic knows, this says nothing about the evidence that the Jesus story was is not wholly fabricated. All it says is that there is at least one piece of evidence that the Jesus story is fabricated. There could be a mountain of evidence that it is not.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

...Obviously we wouldn't have christianity without the O/T. But it is one thing to assert that the gospels and other early "christian" texts rely heavily on interpretations, re-interpretations, and elaborations of Jewish beliefs and texts, and quite another to say that the entirety of the Jesus tradition/sect was created out of these wholecloth.

Originally Posted by angelo atheist

Does he explain that we don't have any original manuscripts of Jo or any other writer of that time. That all of his works were handed down and copied more than 3-4 times in the following centuries, most probably by christian monks ?

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

Yes, actually. In more than one of his works. Are you aware of the general state of our manuscipt attestation (how many times do you think most of the texts from ancient history were copied, and from what century do you think most of our earliest copies date from)? And who was responsible for creating copies? In fact, Mason argues that one of the reasons Josephus received more attention than other authors was the fact that he dealt with Jesus and James.

Originally Posted by aa5874

Again, it is mind boggling that it cannot be understood that Galatians 1.19 and Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 have NO real significance in the argument for an historical Jesus.

Any person, even a child, knows that we can have brothers who do NOT have the same father.

Please, who was the Father of Jesus and who was the Father of James???

Are they the same???

These very simple questions have been answered. The matter has been RESOLVED.

We cannot continue day after day bilindly regurgitating irrelevant information.

According to Apologetic sources, The Father of James the Apostle was Alphaeus or some other person.

According to Apologetic sources the Father of Jesus was God by the Holy Ghost.

Please, let us do history. We have Existing Codices.

In the short-ending gMark it is claimed that there was some other person than Jesus Christ who was called Christ, the Anointed One.

Mark 9:38 KJV We cannot PRESUME that there was ONLY one Messianic claimant in the history of Jews.

And if Jesus was REGARDED as a Messianic ruler in Josephus then he was NOT an OBSCURE preacher.

Jesus the Messianic ruler and King of the Jews IS not Obscure HJ.

Plus, we have NO Dated sources of Josephus from the 1st century.

Originally Posted by Iskander

LOL! They are very important for the right people, namely those with a PhD in ancient history. How could they pretend inerrant knowledge without such questions?