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spin · 09-05-2005, 09:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DE BERGERAC

This text is written by TOTO [quoting Paul Tobin] in some other place:

This leads us naturally to the next question: was Joseph of Arimathea an historical person? We can immediately see the difficulty involved here, when we note that even the town of Arimathea is a fictitious town! As the scholar E. Goldin Hyman pointed out, there is no record in the Old Testament, Torah, Talmud or anywhere else except in the gospels of a place called Arimathea. [5] Attempts to identify the place with Ramathaim (I Maccabees 11:34) and Ramathaim-Zophim (I Samuel 1:1) is based on pure conjecture. [6] How certain can we be of the existence of a person who came from a non-existent town. . .

If he did not exist, the next question would be where Mark got his story (and the name) from. There is a very likely candidate for this. As the Jewish scholar, Hugh Schonfield [8], pointed out, the story of Joseph of Arimathea in the gospels resembles very closely an episode from Josephus' Autobiography.. . .

The similarity in the names of the main protagonist is also considerable. In the same work, Josephus elucidated his distinguished ancestry. His grandfather, also named Joseph, begot Matthias his father in the tenth year of the reign of Archelaus (AD6). In the Greek text (the language Josephus wrote in) Joseph begot Matthias is rendered as Josepou Matthias. In Mark's gospel, Joseph of Arimathea is written in Greek as Joseph apo Arimathias, the similarity is curious.

hrmtym, ha-ramotym, "the heights", with a Greek transliteration of arimaQaia, Arimathea, is nothing strange, given the shiftiness of Hebrew unstressed vowels. It is much easier to see it coming from the Hebrew than from Matthias with some prefix -- what does this prefix mean??? And why no doubled /t/ in Arimathea? Greek gives us the doubled /t/ in Matthias. This name comes from mtt, "reward", yh, YH, and is found as Mattithiah (eg 1 Chr 9:31). There is little to relate Arimathea to Matthias.

spin

Toto · 09-05-2005, 10:01 PM

That was Toto quoting Paul Tobin

I see google took you here:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-33677.html

which is based on Question re Joseph of Arimathea

So now I will clean up the formatting to avoid convusion.

Ted Hoffman · 09-06-2005, 03:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Never mind Josephus mentioning Jesus, did he discuss xianity or something similar to it? Is there a silence about xianity?

Christianity was by and large a second century phenomena.
In case you dispute this:
(a) define first century Christianity [assuming there was such a thing - Galileans? Nazareans?]
(b) Provide examples of 1st Cent Christianity.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DE BERGERAC

was Joseph of Arimathea an historical person?

He was a deus ex machina that the writer employed to move the plot further. A literary creation.

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09-05-2005, 10:01 PM	#52
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	That was Toto quoting Paul Tobin I see google took you here: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-33677.html which is based on Question re Joseph of Arimathea So now I will clean up the formatting to avoid convusion.

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