mountainman

It's not impossible IMO that the 15th century forger of Annals 15:44 used in part Sacred Histories 2.29 of Sulpitius Severus. But in ny event the manuscript discloses an alteration of the form "Chrestos" to "Christos".




Additionally LegionOnomaMoi has swept the problematic ambiguity associated with the term "Chrestos" under the carpet of his discussion. But then again, this evidence concerns the myth argument, so its probably not being adequately addressed in Part 1. Perhaps it will be addressed in Part 2?

aa5874

Please, please, please, your statement is in error.

The NT does contain the phrase CALLED CHRIST.

How many times are you going to keep on making the SAME blatant error???

We have gone through your hopelessly flawed "linguistic argument" already. It does NOT add up.

Again, it is NOT possible to use a linguistic argument ALONE to determine the authenticity of Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1.

Grog

I have yet to see a plausible explanation for turning this "James" into a Christian leader. Just contextually, the story does not work. It makes more sense if the James referred to is the brother of Jesus son Damneus. And doesn't this reference to "called the Christ" refer back to a phrase in the TF that is considered to be an interpolation? Don't all these problems with 20.200 accumulate to the point that we agree it is at least problematic?

And to state the obvious...I am agreeing with you here, Earl.

maryhelena

I've yet to see historical evidence for turning this "James" into a historical figure!

It continues to amaze me that some ahistoricists/mythicists can take JC out of the gospel storyline - and yet still want to keep the story as historical...:banghead:

The NT storyboard is an origin story. A christian origin story. It is not history. If JC is a symbolic or figurative creation, a composite figure - then so are all the related gospel figures to his story. And it is that storyboard that Josephus is supporting - not a historical JC.

Why on earth would a christian, believing in a historical gospel JC, decided to interpolate 'called christ' into the Josephan account of an event around 63 c.e.? Why would that year be relevant to a JC historicist? It makes absolutely no sense for a JC historicist to interpolate the words, 'called christ' into a Josephan time-line of 63 c.e. A year which is 100 years since the execution of the last King and High Priest of the Jews, Antigonus, in 37 b.c. Josephus has more reason to use the words 'called christ' in connection with the 100 year anniversary of the execution of Antigonus, a Jewish messiah figure, than any JC historicists would have had.

The Josephan story of Jesus and James in 63 c.e. is not history.These are two figures from the gospel pseudo-history. Used by Josephus to mark that 100 year anniversary of a real historical event where a Jewish messiah figure was executed - and thereby linking that history as relevant to the gospel JC pseudo-historical storyline...

63 c.e. is also the year that Josephus dates his story of Jesus ben Ananias. A prophetic figure preaching Woe to Jerusalem for 7 years and 5 months.

And for a JC historicist - what possible reason could they have had to insert 'called christ' into a 63 c.e. Josephan storyline?

aa5874

Again, you seem to be confused. Once Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 is a forgery then you simply cannot ASSUME you know that Josephus supported a symbolic Jesus Christ when he did NOT mention Jesus who was called Christ and perhaps even James.

There is NO other mention of Jesus Christ except the known forgery called the TF AJ 18.3.3 and 20.9.1 in the writings of Josephus.

Now, if the forgeries were carried out AFTER Josephus was dead then how in the world could Josephus be supporting a storyboard which he knew NOTHING of???

The DATED actual Texts of antiquity show a BIG BLACK HOLE for Jesus called Christ in the 1st century and that is the storyboard in the Works of Josephus as soon as we recognise the forgeries.

Josephus PREDATED the Jesus storyboard found in the Bible.

LegionOnomaMoi

That's the little problem for you, isn't it? Markedness is central to your ENTIRE approach, yet the only reference you have to support your use of it is a dissertation on biblical hebrew. But where, in that (or any other reference) does the analyst define marked/unmarked structures and then use their classification schema(ta) to claim that because s/he has no explanation for the purpose behind the use of a particular structure that this says anything at all about the text?

We can turn, for example, to an actual expert in Greek and text analysis who uses markedness as the basis of his monograph: Andreas Willi and his The Languages of Aristophanes. In section 5.8 of his monograph, Willi argues that the use of the verbal adjective in Aristophanes is "marked", based primarily on his analysis of Clouds 727-9. However, he admits at the beginnning and end of his analysis that Aristophanes' "use of verbal adjectives is not conspicuous in other parts of Clouds (or any other comedy)" and thus if not for his analysis of the lines given above, his analysis would have little weight.

Willi bases his entire work (just as in your reference to that dissertaion) on functional markedness, and uses it according to the fundamental principles of the theory: "marked" forms, if properly identified, can be said to convey particular semantic content (i.e., the use of the "marked" element is a conscious or unconscious indicator of some particular notion, concept, meaning, intention, implication, etc., the author/speaker makes through its use).

I have asked, repeatedly, for you to give some basis for your perversion of this theory, in which you use it to identify what you consider to be a problem in the text.

You continue to refuse to do so, although the entirety of your argument rests on your use of this theory.

Why is it that when it comes to such a fundamental component of your argument (the use of functional markedness/stylistic markedness as a method for determing that AJ 20.200 has been altered), you can do nothing but dodge requests for some references demonstrating you are not simply using this theory to do something it was not only never intended to do, but in fact cannot do?


She is, actually, and even in this article. First, the context you give is misleading. Yes, she is talking about IE word order, but that's irrelevant. The point is that structural markedness can be used to demonstrate preferred structures, but cannot be used to explain them. The problem of preferred IE word order goes back centuries, because older IE languages like Greek are are so flexible. Viti begins by discussing that markedness as a tool for description does not suffice to explain word order variation specifically because simply identifying preferred structures tells one nothing about why they are preferred, or what variant word orders might tell us.

In particular, that long list of "preposed genitives" you quoted earlier belong to a structure she relegates to a footnote (p. 209): kinship using two proper names, such as kroisos ho Aluatteo where both the head+kinship term along with the governed genitive involve proper names "of the structure "X the one of Y". Apart from that footnote, her discussion of kinship gentives doesn't involve the structure you referred to, but it does demonstrate the considerable variability in kinship word order, as well as the qualitatively different structure of the type you referred to and that we see in AJ 20.200, where a kin term governs a genitive phrase.


Her analysis is limited to the genitive word order, however, and only with respect to its position relative to the governing noun, so as useful as it is, Bakker's monograph on the noun phrase is much more so. In particular, his chapter "Word order in multiple modifier NPs".

Bakker states quite explicitly that, "the semantics of the modifiers is not the factor that is decisive for the order of the constituents in the noun phrase in Greek" or, put differently, that one cannot simply look at the lexemes and word order (as you do) and determine anything meaninful. Bakker gives several examples of "the 'improper' position" of various modifiers, even those which "cannot be explained by a special pragmatic marking". (p. 106).

Instead, despite your protests against my bracketing, rather than chopping up the NPs in the way that you do, according to Bakker, the whole of the NP(s) can be used to explain the order of its constituents: "the postion of a constituent in a multiple-modifier NP depends on its saliency: the more salient the information, the further to the left it has to be expressed." (p. 106). In Josephus, almost inevitably whenever he discusses some character he cares little about, everything about that character is preposed, and we get the name last, exactly as in AJ 20.200. As Bakker notes, the fact that (for example) we have "brother" first in AJ 20.200 whereas in other uses of "brother" the kin term is typically postposed is irrelevant, because the semantic content of the words do not matter, but in all cases ("NPs with multiple prenominal or postnominal modifiers and NPs with both pre- and postnominal modifieres") it is saliency which determines word order.





I have quoted innumerable specific examples, including those given in the references I referred to.

Let's break this down: you've made a claim that certain exceptions to word order, presumably word order in which the genitive comes before the name or is otherwise similar to AJ 20.200, can be accounted for because Josephus is naming "famous" people or people "previously mentioned". Except:

1) Despite your best attempts to first claim Cohen did recognize marked syntax, and when that didn't work to claim it is all a "red herring", both he and the article I referred to specifically state that Josephus is particularly irregular in that he seems to do the opposite of what we would expect, and "introduce" people after he's mentioned them, or to re-introduce them.

2) You have never done anything to demonstrate that the examples of "inverted" word order you gave were inverted for the reasons you stated. You simply claimed this was the reason.

3) Even better, the literature on Greek syntax doesn't seem to match your little personal theory. ln "Rheme before Theme in the Noun Phrase" (Studies in Language 32(4); 2008), Viti states quite explicitly:While the functions of new information and discontinuous information prefer prenominal genitives the function of old information seemingly has the same probability to be encoded either by a prenominal or by a postnominal genitive." And if we examine Josephus, we do not find any reason to support your claim that the exceptions have to do with fame or previous mention, because there is no correlation between alterations in kinship or other identification and either fame or previous mention.


You simply created an ad hoc explanation which contradicts both studies of greek syntax and Josephus.

"fame" and "previous mention" have no impact. You simply chose to explain exceptions with this, but failed to demonstrate any evidence for your claim. As I noted above, if we look at Greek in general, the opposite holds true. And if we look at Josephus in particular, he simply doesn't follow any pattern which demonstrates he is taking into account fame or previous mention. You have just used these as ad hoc explanations for exceptions which you want to explain.



I gave examples before, which you claimed were not valid because they were people with famous relatives or previously mentioned relatives. What you did not do is present any evidence that this was the reason behind the word order in the structures I identified. On the other hand, I not only cited sources demonstrating that Josephus does basically the opposite of what you claim, but also (see above) that you're order when it comes to new vs. old information is contradicted by studies of Greek syntax.


The issue is that it is such suggestions which are at the heart of your argument: markedness. If you can't come up with a suggestion, what part of the theory suggests that this is a reason to question the texts?



Let's look at some actual examples of "bracketing" by real linguists, shall we?


That's taken from a Studies in Language paper by Matic "Topic, focus, and discourse structure: Ancient Greek word order" (27(3); 2003).

This kind of bracketing of entire clauses, phrases, etc., is continued throughout the paper. Why? Because the interest is in pragmatics and function, not formalist/generative analysis, and thus we find functional bracketing such as (emphasis in original):

i. Topic- Narrow Focus-Verb-Presupposed material
ii. Topic - [Verb-Focal Material], {[Verb + FocalMaterial] = Broad Focus}


Yet you seem to have little idea at all at how these are "bracketed" by actual functional linguists:


Now, compare this to a constituent and formal analysis using markedness within Optimality theory (a generative, chomsky-type model):


The sentence in question in the latter is "what did mary say". Notice in the latter every word and its position counts. We can find much the same kind of generative formalism with Greek:



What, I wonder, is the theory you are using to "bracket" as you do?

Functional "bracketing" is based on the analysts determination of functional structures, not your naive transformationalist crap. With Greek in particular, even "broad" bracketing, such as that in "Topic, focus, and discourse structure: Ancient Greek word order," only holds true in general. Ancient Greek word order "cannot be described in terms of rules, but at best as tendencies", yet Matic isn't even dealing with strict word order per se, but with the position of, for example, an entire prepositional phrase. The "tendencies" referred to concern "brackets" of material (actually called things like "Focal Material"), whether a single verb or a prepositional phrase.

I'm not the one with the brush. This markedness thing is your claim, and you simply have failed to support it. It's unfortunate that so many lack the access to the materials as well as the background to realize how ad hoc and baseless your analyses are. However, for any who are interested in seeing how modern linguistic theory may be applied and what it consists of, there is a freely accessible analysis of "thetic" syntactic structures in Koine Greek ("thetic" refers to propositions, sentences, or similar units which introduce people, entities, states of affairs, etc., which includes the introduction of characters in, for example, Josephus):

Thetic Constructions in Koine Greek

maryhelena

aa, this is what your wrote earlier;


You have writtend "could have been written by Josephus.". Do you now want to correct that statement?

Earl has also conceded the linguistic possibility that Josephus could have written the relevant words under discussion.

Once the possibility is admitted that Josephus could have written "called christ" - then one has to face any implications, however unwelcome, that possibility will present.

Attempting to claim that the gospel JC story was written after the death of Josephus is a very long shot in the dark. And all for what - so one can deny the possibility, a possibility that you, yourself, have admitted, that Josephus could have written "called christ"...:banghead:

Toto

The suggestion has been made that this thread is at the end of its usefulness.

You may want to provide a few concluding remarks - but repeating the same arguments will not convince anyone who has not been convinced already.

tanya

In my opinion, the link provided by LegionOnomaMai (Thank you!!!) to Bailey's Doctoral dissertation requires more than fifteen seconds of inspection.

It is premature to lock this thread. DCHindley's excellent outline, on the various forms of λεγόμενος, on another thread, complement the efforts to achieve resolution, on this thread.

Several posters have praised the efforts to date. Toto, I think that you are uniquely qualified to summarize in three or four sentences, the issues involved, and their resolution, if you believe that the thread is exhausted.

I don't see anyone bleeding, unconscious, in a life threatening posture, please allow the debate to continue....

On the one hand, some folks, including myself, imagine that the disputed phrase attributed to Josephus, represents an interpolation. Others doubt that explanation, and believe that the text indeed represents ink flowing from Josephus' quill. Both sides introduce evidence to support their positions. If the linguistic evidence is conclusive, one way or the other, could you please summarize it, in a sentence or two, and pronounce the winner of the debate, for, on my part, I could not make such a clear cut distinction.

As I understand it, you feel that the dispute has failed to introduce any new material, but, then, it should be possible to summarize the present situation, in a few sentences. I have just glanced at this excellent thesis presented to the faculty in Amsterdam, link provided above, but it looks like a month of heavy reading, to make heads or tails out of it.....

You are obviously very proficient, and I know that you understand these intricate arguments, so, please, before shutting down the thread, just explain, as you frequently do, the highlights, to summarize for those of us, hopelessly lost in the arcane character of this debate. Is this link to the Doctoral dissertation, irrelevant to the discussion of Josephus' use of λεγόμενος ?

thief of fire

Killer post.