Alf

I think you put too much blame into King James. The "Jesus is God" was decided already at the nicean meeting around Constantine long before King James.

True, KJV did add some stuff. I have heard that the number 666 is a King James invention, the revelations did not originally make any such assertion. However, I don't think they defined all of christianity as we have it today, many of the things was already set in stone by previous church fathers long before King James. Many things such as virgin birth, trinity, divinity of Jesus etc was established already at 300 AD and even earlier and anyone who thought otherwise were persecuted as heretics.

Alf

Alf

Sigh, all experts agree that that paragraph is fake. The only disagreement among them is how fake it is and in what manner it is fake.

Alf

miniverchivi

Fake how? As in Josephus never wrote that, or fake as in Josephus was lying?

UncleJim

Go into any Latino neighborhood and you can find someone so named. Except he is likely to be rational.

darstec

Fake as in later Christians inserted the passage into his work while copying and preserving it many years after Josephus death. Josephus was a Jew who would not have said nice things about Jesus referred to as from Nazareth. But then he wrote about several people named Jesus. Jesus is a Greek form of the name Joshua. It was at least as prevalent as the name John is today if not more. I've heard estimates as high as 1 in 10 males. But that might be hyperbole. And Joseph was also a very popular name.

Didymus

Trips off the tongue, but exactly what lacks plausibility?

To me, the crucifixion of an obscure/enigmatic individual seems more plausible than Paul's believing that Jesus was crucified in a spiritual realm, and way more than Paul's knowing about a "historical" Jesus but ignoring everything about him. In the land of the implausible, shouldn't parsimony be king?

Didymus

Didymus

Absolutely. (Why didn't I think of that?)

In a sense it's the same hypothesis, because everything that follows is based on the assumption that Jesus was a real human being. And, of course, the absence of a known biography permits believers to "custom build" a theology and biography to suit their predilections.

Didymus

dog-on

Didymus, I would buy it!

Didymus

Keep in mind that they were Hellenized Jews and God-fearers, living mainly if not exclusively in the Diaspora. The lack of a life story wasn't a problem for them, as we can see from Paul's epistles. Nor was deifying (or divinizing) a human being, as we can see from the later growth of gospel Christianity.

Of course, Paul's spiritual Jesus was also a "no body" :grin:. But even prior to Paul's getting in the act, this non-existent being had become somebody with the power to redeem mankind.

I have to think that there was a precipitating event, a proximate cause, for the beginning of Christianity. It's hard to imagine that such a cult could begin just on the basis on theological musings about a Messiah being crucified in the Third Heaven.

Didymus

Alf

Fake as in "the paragraph has been tampered with by later interpolators".

This paragraph has been analyzed by many scholars, do a google on josephus and you will find loads of them. Earl Doherty has a good walkthru of it as does others.

The experts disagree on the details. Exactly what has been replaced and what the original looked like or even if there was an original. Many people see that the paragraph before it and the paragraph after it appear to connect together well so that it apperas the paragrahp has been inserted. On the other hand, it is a big bunch of text to insert in a manuscript if it was completely inserted, so chances are also that Josephus did write some paragraph about some person and that later scribes has changed the paragraph to be as it is today.

One possible candidate of the paragraph would be Appolonious of Tyrana who fit much of the paragraph except for the particular gospel Jesus things and so while Josephus originally wrote and described Appolonious some scribe changed the paragraph to be about Jesus instead and made the proper amendments to make it clear that it was gospel Jesus that was described. This is mere speculation but it is all we can do because we do not have the original paragraph as written by Josephus available to us.

Alf