Malachi151

I'd like to address the best arguments in defense of the TF. My position is that the entire TF is a full insertion by later Christians, perhaps Eusebius.

The Christians defenses of this passage are either that its all authentic, which is a minority position, or that "part of it" is original and has just been added to by later Christians, but that there was something there before that mentioned Jesus.

The later claim is the main one that I want to address, so I'd like to know what the best arguments are for this position, sources, books, authors, links, etc.

Malachi151

Some questions on this as well.

> What is the oldest copy of Antiquities that we have?

> Where did this copy come from?

> How many copies do we have that come from different sources, or do all extant copies come from one source?

> How many people quote Antiquities before the appearance of the TF in secondary sources?

> How many people quoted the TF since its first known appearance in secondary sources?

> Who was the first person we know of to quote the TF?

ynquirer

Interesting questions. You here acknowledge you know almost nothing, if not nothing at all, about the relevant evidence to have an opinion on the authenticity of the TF. What is your position that it is "a full insertion by later Christians, perhaps Eusebius" based on? Outright prejudice?

Malachi151

I never said that I know almost nothing about it, I'm looking for some exact specifics on the issue from primary sources. I've read the book that it comes from myself in English, book 18, and I've read many discussions on it. I've read the cases on both sides.

What I want to now is, what is considered the "best" case made in defense of the TF? It may well be one I've already read, but I am not a scholar in this area, so I don't know what scholars in this area consider to be the best defense of the TF.

From what I have seen, I consider the defense made by J.P. Meier to be the best, but I doubt that it actually is considered the best, surely there is something in journals that I'm not aware of, I only have access to popular books.

I'm up on the TF as far as popular literature goes, but I don't read peer reviewed journals on this subject.

I also have read several things which I question the accurateness of, and can't verify, thus I'm asking some questions that I think I already know the answers to, but I'd like to see other answers.

A lot of these issues are address on Peter's site on his section on the TF, but I can't verify each of these things:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/testimonium.html

For example:

I can't properly evaluate this, because I don't know how familiar, if at all, these people really were with Antiquities, which is relevant.

I'm trying to get more specific information than I already have.

Another question by the way:

Regarding the recent defense of the TF based on the claim that some sections of it show a "statistically reliable" similarity to a passage to Luke, showing that they both come from a common source, how sound is this argument? From what I have seen of it, it looks pretty weak, see for example:

http://members.aol.com/fljosephus/compTable.htm

Malachi151

Additional question, does anyone have a translation of the Table of Contents of Antiquities, especially for book 18?

Toto

It sounds like you need to find a copy of Hardwick's book and read his evidence, right? What books have you read?

Goldberg's site, which you call a "recent defense" is not very recent. Goldberg is an amateur, and his statistical evidence has been discussed here before. Here's the most recent thread: Goldberg and Josephus.

You might browse through the archives here - most of the questions you ask have been addressed before.

Roger Pearse

You may find my notes on the mss of Antiquities useful. The link at the top to 'all the manuscripts' is translated from Schreckenburg.

According to the Loeb, the oldest part of any portion of Antiquities is Codex Vaticanus Palatinus 14, which it dates to the 9-10th century, containing books 11-17. According to Schreckenburg this is 14th century. So you need to go through the two and see which it is.

Long works like Antiquities or Livy did not travel down the centuries in one volume, but split up into decades (groups of 10 books) or pentads (groups of 5). So the transmission of books 11-20 is different from that of books 1-10.

I have no details on this, but it must have been written in the Byzantine empire somewhere.

I believe all of them derive from a single exemplar of the 9th century, written in minuscule script and itself copied from an exemplar in Uncial.

This is quite normal when a technology change occurs -- someone makes a copy in the new medium, and everyone then copies the copy, not the original, even if the two are together. Emil Kroymann was able to demonstrate that every Italian copy of the collection of works of Tertullian known as the 'Cluny collection' were copied from a manuscript in Florence written by Niccolo Niccoli in modern bookhand, who was copying a manuscript written in Gothic. The two mss have always been together, but no-one else ever struggled to transcribe the Gothic text -- all the copies were based on Niccolos.

Two quote from Antiquities 11-20. Julius Africanus, and Origen. On these see my notes.

No idea. But Eusebius' "Church History" was so widely circulated a text that the answer is probably a large number.

Eusebius. (The same is true of a lot of texts, since his books are mosaics of quotations, and a lot of those texts have since been lost).

A word of caution: do not infer anything from the date of the manuscripts. Nearly all texts from antiquity are extant in late manuscripts. That does not mean that they have been tampered with; merely that earlier copies are now lost. Indeed many of those earlier copies were destroyed as recently as 1500, when printing was invented.

I hope that helps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Malachi151

I'm not calling Goldberg's site a recent defense, I'm calling the argument that the "acceptable portions" of the TF are "statistically similar" to Luke 24 a "recent" defense of the TF, by recent I mean something that has come up in the last 10-15 years. I just used his site as an example of the basic issue.

As for Hardwik's book, its not exactly easy to come by. I was just wanting to know if anyone here had additional information on this or could point to some accessible sources that I don't have to buy or get through interlibrary loan. I'm just trying to finish up an article and don't intend to spend months researching this issue.

Web resources are preferred, or books that I can reasonably expect to find at the local library. I moved recently and no longer have access to a university library and haven't found out yet if any of the universities here allow non-students to check out books, plus none are close to me like where I used to live.

Malachi151

Roger Pearse:

Thanks Roger. One question on this would be, how likely is it that the entire TF was originally an interlinear or marginal note, that was later copied into the text? To me this seems like the most likely culprit, though it is large for an interlinear I would think.

It seems to me that perhaps a Christian was reading this, someone prior to Eusebius, and upon reading the section on Pilate, they made this note at about the time that they thought Jesus would have lived, and this was later incorporated into the text in a copy that Eusebius had, or he himself quoted the note as if it were part of the text.

The only other explanation for a full insertion I would think is that it was intentionally inserted in an effort to make it appear authentic.

Ideas on this?

Roger Pearse

If we presume that the TF is an interpolation (i.e. 'whether' = true), this is easily the top candidate for 'how' it happened, because this is the normal method whereby stuff gets into texts.

The reason is that copyists make mistakes. If by chance a copyist skips a bit and realises later, they tended to write it in the margin (these are pretty broad in most codices), with a line indicating where it should go. The next scribe making a copy of the book can then reinsert it.

Unfortunately the margins are also where comments get written. All you need is a bit of wear and a bit of confusion, and the comment gets treated as an omission and included. This happens a LOT. For instance in Tertullian's De praescriptione haereticorum, there is a reference to Mithras, although the word is not present in all families of manuscripts. But if you read the text without the word, it seems that the text really is about the devil, not about Mithras (unless T. has changed subject mid-paragraph); and so some scholars have taken the view that the word is a marginal comment (a mistaken one) which got just this treatment by some medieval scribe.

Indeed just this process seems to have happened with one family of the manuscripts of the Jewish War, which also contains the TF. It is a reasonable presumption that someone copied the TF into the margin (there are any number of manuscripts today in which the TF is included by itself) and then someone else presumed it was part of the text which had been omitted; and, voila!

All sorts of stuff gets written in margins. Indeed one manuscript from the Irish foundation at Bobbio in North Italy has *conversation* written in Old Irish in the margin along the lines of "it's cold today, isn't it?" "Very. Was that meat last night alright, do you think?" (etc) No doubt silence was enforced in the scriptorium, so a couple of monks made use of the margin to talk. And if questioned by the Corrector as to what these marks meant, doubtless they said (in an Irish brogue), "Oh, 'tis just praising the Lord in Irish, yer honor" or something like that.

It's possible. I myself believe that Eusebius gives us what he found; he seems to me really proud of having access to Origen's library, and being able to reference so much stuff (without always considering fully whether it quite supported the point that he wanted to make!). But whether such a process had happened to his copy, well, we cannot know.

What *is* true is that Eusebius' text would then tend to overwrite the authentic text in copies of Josephus. As you probably know, this process (jargon word='harmonization') occurs wherever a scribe who is accustomed to one form of a text copies a less familiar one, and unconsciously writes the more familiar words when he hears the less familiar. (I have been told that mss. of Luke reflect the text of Matthew in just this manner). We can show that this was occurring for the TF, because St. Jerome quotes the TF in Latin in "De viris illustribus" in a slightly different form (indicating that ca. 393 a different version of the Greek text was known to him; a similar version is likewise known to Michael the Syrian in the 12th century). But the Greek translation of DVI has been harmonised with the Eusebian version, with which the scribes were far more familiar. Josephus was always a rare text; Eusebius always a common one. There is no malice in all this, of course; merely human nature at work.

Most people feel instinctively that the text of the TF as it stands has something wrong with it. Such a view has been general since the 1600's, when Archbishop Ussher (who also detected the interpolations in Ignatius, and then recovered mss of the uninterpolated text) expressed it. The difficulty is where. It has elements such as the last sentence which are strange for a Christian to write; others which would be strange for anyone else to write.

May I suggest that you obtain J. Carleton Paget's monster article on the TF from the Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 52 (2001)? This reviews all the arguments, although very reluctant to come to any conclusion. Possibly it may exist in electronic form (anyone?). Likewise Alice Whealey's book "Josephus on Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk)" (look on Amazon) will give you the history of the question, and who thought what. Shlomo Pines article on the TF and Agapius is interesting, but slightly marginal.

If we suppose that someone interpolated it intentionally (in the manner of the forged decretals), then I would imagine that we would have to ask whether there is evidence of this, and for what purpose.

It is quite hard for my ignorant eyes to see what it says that would be useful to anyone in antiquity. The purpose for which it is quoted today -- to prove that Jesus existed and was more or less who the bible says he was -- is not one that was denied in antiquity by pagans. (Indeed the details of Jesus' life and death were a source of merriment to pagans -- what a sleazeball founded *your* religion, they would jeer). Likewise the works of the traitor Josephus were not preserved in Jewish hands, and it is questionable whether his testimony was useful either for anti-Jewish polemic. On the contrary, surely it would support Jewish allegations that Jesus was a magician?

Since it is always possible to allege foul motives for any text which we find inconvenient, I always feel that we mustn't do it lightly lest we find ourselves merely writing fiction decorated with a subjective selection of ancient sources. Accidents happen all the time; frauds are by their nature much less common.

My own ignorant view is that the text got damaged at some point, and that it was badly 'restored' by a Christian copyist, picked up by Eusebius, and this version then harmonized the others out of existence. I believe that there is a genuine Josephan core in there; I also have grave doubts whether we can today recover it, other than the last sentence. But my ignorant and ill-educated opinion is not of course of any value.

All the best,

Roger Pearse