jakejonesiv

Doherty is very good at establishing that there was no historical Jesus in view in the Pauline writings. That holds true whether or not Paul wrote any of it.

Agreed. There is no evidence of 1st century Christianity that will withstand scrutiny.

Simon Magus is an interesting possibility. GRS Mead had some speculations in this area.

That is an agreeable observation.
Neil Godfrey has done some fascinating research into Justin's gospel source.

I found the answer quite refreshing. Nobody has all the answers and more work is to be done. I look forward to your future insights.

Jake Jones IV

rlogan

Hi Roger.

Thank you kindly for a reasonable interaction. Need to contend with the snowing today, and will return tonight, for this and response to jakejonesiv but wanted to clarify this:

I see you object to the "dishonesty" term, and really spend a lot of energy parsing every bit of evidence down into "well, this little piece isn't exactly a lie, by my definition or interpretation, and therefore..."

I was hesitant to quote any particular lines from the Demonstratio after the pounding given Iason (sp?) for "quote mining", so I gave the link - and readers can see themselves what he's up to.



I am baffled, actually, that this can be a point of disagreement among reasonable people. Eusebius is "proving" the gospel, not doing history. He is so explicit about this that anyone who has read this work and still fronts him as a "historian" is intellectually dishonest. It's just goofy stuff in the Demonstratio. Comedy, even.


Is there even the slightest bit of critical inquiry? No, and in reading the Demonstratio the message came through so clearly to me that this was his life's work and was omnipresent in all his writing. Not just the Demonstratio

Roger, you excuse this as something that was common to the time. Even if I grant you that as a point of argument, it does not follow that we should therefore trust him today.

Every line of Eusebius needs to be read with the understanding he is "proving the gospel".



And this again brings us to the Testimonium Flavianum. Eusebius is the first. He's Proving the Gospel. And it is with a lie of monstrous character. Forging a passage in someone else's history.

You think he's ignorant of supressing the legitimate work of Josephus? How could he possibly be so?


Cheers. And again - thank you.

Roger Pearse

Hello yourself! Thanks for the kind note. Lucky you to have snow...

Am I doing this? I don't think I am, you know. The argument is that Eusebius confesses to being a deliberate liar; the motive is to be able to ignore his works. I ask for the quotations, since I know how useful Eusebius' works are. When produced, they turn out to be these two passages, one from the HE and one from the PE. I don't think either deserves this interpretation. And anyway, isn't this business of going around a voluminous writer trying to quote-mine something to 'prove' him a self-confessed liar rather demeaning?

We must be at cross-purposes here, because I don't understand why these are mutually incompatible. Is M.R.James a liar because he wrote ghost stories as well as serious scholarship? Must Winston Churchill not be a historian, because he also wrote party political literature? I don't see it, I must say.

Hey, slow down! To me this involves far too many assumptions. For instance, you know that no professional other than Ken Olsen thinks he wrote the TF?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

Note - Roger - you and Bede confuse an internet search for this subject by making Ken Olson into Ken Olsen.

This seems a bit strong. Ken Olson, who is a PhD candidate studying under Mark Goodacre, published his theory that Eusebius forged the TF passage in a peer reviewed journal (The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61.2 (April 1999): pp. 305-22). Do you know of polls among "professionals" showing widespread rejection? How many "professionals" have stated an opinion, based on what evidence?

Stephen Carlson does not dismiss the theory lightly.

Robert Price and Roger Viklund support Olson, while Paget, J. Carleton, "Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity," Journal of Theological Studies, 52.2 (2001) evidently opposes the idea.

jakejonesiv

Frank R. Zindler in The Jesus The Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources also rejects the entire TF as an interpolation. Zindler, sees the TF as a two step process. First an unknown interpolator puts in the germ of the TF and Eusebius expands on it.

Zindler also disposes of the references to JBap and James brother of Jesus as inauthentic. Then he turns his attention to the Mishnah, the Tosefta , the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, and the Sepher Toldoth Yeshu. When Zindler is finished, there is not a shred of a historical Jesus :wave: to be found in any ancient Jewish source.

Jake Jones IV

Roger Pearse

My mistake; sorry.

The source of my information is J. Carleton Paget, who reviews just about every conceiveable theory, indicating who says what. But if you know different, I'm certainly willing to listen. Has anyone else published in support of Olson?

I should add that the late Solomon Zeitlin also held the same view; indeed may have invented it for all I know. Zeitlin was a curious character. Some of his judgements seem sound, for instance on the Slavonic Josephus; on the other hand he maintained that the Dead Sea Scrolls were medieval.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I know who this person is. Is he a professional Josephus scholar perhaps? The name is not familiar, but then I don't claim to be very familiar with that area.

This does not appear to be a scholarly paper, tho.

But I don't want to go off onto a tangent here, discussing the TF, or indeed Olson's allegation. If someone should wish to say that the view that Eusebius is the author of the TF is other than a very minority view, then of course that is their right. But for the purposes of discussing Eusebius, surely it matters little unless there is general agreement that he is?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

I do not have access to his article.

Robert Price

Degrees:

Doctor of Philosophy, New Testament; Drew University, Madison NJ; May 1993
Master of Philosophy, New Testament; Drew University, Madison NJ; October 1992
Doctor of Philosophy, Systematic Theology; Drew University, Madison NJ; May, 1981
Master of Theological Studies, New Testament; Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton MA; May 1978
Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy and Religion; History; Montclair State College, Upper Montclair NJ; May 1976

Affiliations:

Society of Biblical Literature
The Westar Institute (Jesus Seminar; Paul Seminar; Canon Seminar)
Member, Schleiermacher Colloquium (AAR)
Editor, The Journal of Higher Criticism
Member of the Editorial Staff editorial staff for Free Inquiry, The Humanist, and Secular Nation.
Professor of Biblical Criticism
for The Center for Inquiry Institute
Professor of Scriptural Studies at Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary


You can read Olson's arguments for yourself and decide if they are persuasive. I would not want to confine myself to a "general agreement" in a field as ideologically driven as this one.

I'm sure that you have found that there is a vague "general agreement" that Eusebius is untrustworthy. Should we just stop there without examining that question?

rlogan

heh. finally got deep enough to where I needed to get the track rig going and plow to the road. I live a ways off it.


I do understand that you are forcing the skeptics to be exacting. I may not be conveying my position well enough:


I understand the narrow "confession" is your central thrust, and I agree with you that we need to be very careful about taking what someone says in the right context.

It will come as no surprise to you that I came into connection with the rascal Eusebius through my desire to evaluate the Testimonium Flavianum. It is critical to me in evaluating Eusebius.

The "noble lie confession" is actually less important to me than the fact that the hand of Eusebius is the one that gives us the TF, for the purpose of "proving" the gospel, and that he is an incorrigable, even laughable apologist.



Can't disagree with that as far as some people go, yes. In my case, as opposed to "ignoring" them per se, it is a matter of solving a mystery.

I cannot fault you on the approach of demanding an exacting account from the proponents of the "confessional".

Toto, in his usual gift at nicely referencing previous discussions, has given us the relevant threads. I respectfully come down on the side of seeing Eusebius as a propagandist. It isn't a matter of these isolated quotes for me, either.


I think in all cases we need to inspect the motivations of an author. Some things can be harmless. Boy howdy, does political and economic belief play a role in how we "tell history". You bet. If James was merely writing fiction about ghosts - no problem. But if he wrote books about ghosts in order to assist him in proving ghosts are responsible in some way for the scholarly matters he concerned himself with - then I would seriously question his work.

Eusebius in very loud terms informs us of his quest for "proving the gospel". His other writings are not different fields of endeavor. They are one and the same.


I am of the belief that he could not possibly be unaware of its forged nature, regardless of whether he performed the deed himself. He is just as guilty for passing it off as an original.


Eusebius is not seeing things from the perspective of more than a thousand years of police state church canon dictating what the history is.

Instead, he is the one actually defining what the church history is. At a critical time of political power struggles over "canon" - that is, church history.

He was a Bishop, smack in the middle of Nicea and other battles over canon with excommunications, heretical charges back and forth, tamperings with documents by all sides, and sitting at the side of the emperor, literally.


He wasn't unaware that the TF was a forgery. He was acutely aware of it and a whole host of other highly political matters of "faith". He was at the very center of a huge power struggle coming on the heels of a history he knew much better than we - for that history is supressed afterwards in favor of "canon".

And he wrote what would redound to the glory...

S.C.Carlson

Here's how Paget characterized Olson's case: "Recently Olson has attempted to show that the TF reflects Eusebian language. Prima facie this is not an unreasonable thesis. Eusebius knew Josephus' works quite well and he is the first to quote the TF. Olson's case is by no means a paltry one but it is not as powerful as he thinks." (p. 577) and "As I have tried to show above, his attempts to describe the motive for the forgery are unconvincing. In the face of this, his linguistic observations are suggestive, but nothing else." (p. 578)

Paget concedes that there are three striking parallels ("doer of paradoxical deeds," "tribe of Christians," "until now") between the TF and Eusebius and tries to explain them away (not very convincingly, in my opinion). What is interesting to me about these phrases is that they are not paralleled in the Agapius version of the TF--which I consider to be a more primitive (e.g. less Christianized) form of the TF. One possibility for this interesting set of facts is that Eusebius could be the one responsible for the interpolations into an authentic core, but more work is definitely needed--especially on the Agapius side of the question.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

No, there I agree with you (although I gather from Alice Whealey that the TF is not nearly as political a subject as it once was among scholars).

On controversial subjects the consensus of scholars usually seems to reflect the consensus of those who appoint them. I don't think that this is in a sinister sense, but simply that this is how the world works.

So I tend to feel that the consensus of paleographers as to the date of a medieval manuscript may be accepted. The consensus of German scholars in 1935 that Lucian was semitised trash perhaps need not. Just my opinion, of course.

I don't think I have, you know. But possibly such exists and I have never noticed.

All the best,

Roger Pearse