DCHindley

LOM,

Shouldn't we make a distinction between what Josephus wrote and the wording contained in the the manuscripts available to Origen, Hegesippus and Eusebius? I think you overstep the evidence.

DCH

LegionOnomaMoi

Rather than edit my last post to add this (and thereby make it too long, something I've been accused of doing too many times recently), I've decided to comment on this use of logic in a new post. It illustrates a common and (I think) interesting logical fallacy which has been studied in psychology (or cog. sci., or whatever subdiscipline one wants to put guys like Johnson-Laird in). The fallacy also is the basis of inductive reasoning, but in this case it's more problematic than helpful.

A nice list of some of these "biases" which come naturally to humans may be found here, including the example I give:

(p. 33, emphasis added).

The cognitive psychology (and evolutionary psychology) take on this "bias" in human cognition is that for the most part it is adaptive. We are particularly good at seeing patterns, at looking at small bits of data and inferring from them (building a more complete picture), and it's a good thing we are (just think how poorly facial recognition software works compared to a human infant). However, human intuition/bias isn't always helpful, which explains why so few people really like math (and, IMO, why so many mathematicians are either outright crazy or bordline).

The situation of Michelle and the library is akin to the situation we have with Josephus and "called Christ" construction. In the library example, people tend to ignore the fact that librarians are rare and concentrate on what they do know (what traits they imagine librarians have). With Josephus, what we have is an unusual construction that nonetheless does exist in the NT and in a few other christian documents (some either quoting Josephus, or at the very least believing they are). On the other hand, we have literally tens of thousands of references to Jesus between the time Josephus lived and the date of our earliest Antiquities manuscript. Hundreds and hundreds of references to Jesus from various texts (the gospels, letters both in and outside of the NT, early christian writings, legal documents, official edicts, histories, etc.). Almost all of these are the product of Christians, and almost all (with the exception of autographs and inscriptions) have been copied by christians. In the gospels alone, the words Jesus and Christ appear something like 700 hundred times. More importantly, Christian usage outside of the gospel, both in earlier writings (Paul) and later writings, doesn't reflect gospel usage in a number of ways. In the gospels, Jesus appears FAR more frequently than Christ. In the NT epistles, Christ appears almost twice as frequently, and in Christian circles "Christ" became almost a last name quite quickly, and also is far more commonly found than Jesus alone. Likewise, while even the gospels are fairly silent about Jesus' father (and apart from Jesus' role as a supernatural Dennis the Menace in the "infancy gospels", we are left with relatively little mention of Jesus' father especially, compared to his family in general, in later sources as well), yet we know from what is preserved in Contra Celsum that Celsus was aware of a tradition that Jesus was illegitimate, and there are echos of this tradition elsewhere (not counting the gospel accounts).

The point is that Christians did not, it appears, simply take out of the gospels any and all titles, references, mannerisms, and so forth of, to, about, from/etc., Jesus. Regardless of the inherent problems in the so-called "criterion of dissimilarity", while this is indeed a problematic method for determining what goes back to the "historical Jesus", it is unproblematic for the most part as a means of determining how christians referred to Jesus, or spoke about him. That is, the fact that Jesus is compared to the ruler of demons in the gospels obviously does not reflect christian usage, any more than Origen's reference to Celus' account does.

To look at the tiny handful of examples we have where the construction "called Christ" is used and use these to say anything about Josephus' usage is to make the fallacious mistake outlined in the source I cited: ignoring the odds. In the library example, we're given details about the person that push us towards "librarian", and we don't reflect on how rare librarians are, no matter what a person's personality is. In the case of Josephus, we can make the equivalent mistake of focusing on those few examples we know of, and ignore the rarity of this use by Christians (and the lack of non-Christian texts with which to compare).

Without compelling evidence linking Josephus' use with Christian use (e.g., if Hegesippus actually had used this phrase, and we knew he had, and knew that Origen used him when he refers to Josephus and James), we are left with a great deal of evidence against the idea that Christians used this phrase at all. Only by "ignoring the odds" do we get from the tiny number of uses of this phrase to concluding that it was inserted into Josephus.

LegionOnomaMoi

I'm not sure what you mean by "make a distinction". Of course we should, but what distinction are you referring to? What you quoted was the second of two possibilities I gave (and the one I find more likely). I find it highly unlikely that Origen took Matthew's use of "called Christ" and coincidently only uses it after mentioning Josephus. If Spin's hypothesis is correct, than Origen is confusing Hegesippus and Josephus, and not only ignoring Hegesippus' wording, but also using a construction almost never found in centuries of Christian writings based on Matthew, despite the fact that
1) the commentary containing the construction begins with a quote from Matt. 13.54, in which Jesus' brothers are named, not the 3 places in Matthew where the construction occurs
2) Every time Origen refers to a work (e.g., Paul, Matthew, Jude), he uses the wording there. The only time he uses the phrase "called Christ" is after speaking of Josephus.

In other words, I don't think the addition of "James the Just" or similar changes are particularly relevant, any more than I do the fact that Origen is clearly taking liberties with Josephus elsewhere (by connecting this one scene with the end result, despite Josephus' clear intent). What matters is where the phrase "called Christ" appears, and here the wording is quite distinctive. That Origen is reflecting Josephus' wording seems evident by the consistency in of his use of the phrase "called Christ" every time he refers to Josephus' reference to James, as well as the unbelievable rarity of the phrase in our texts at all.

DCHindley

As the "War of Titans" continues without rest,

Here is an archived post about the detail contained in Hegesippus' account of the Death of James:

To be honest, this might work against my hypothesis if one wants to work from the assumption that H derived all the gory details from Jewish sources besides some sort of gloss in a copy of Josephus. Then again, why can't both be the case?

DCH

DCHindley

I'm not sure where this assertion is located. I had checked out this book for a week or so trying to find something out about Josephus' manner of intrucing new characters and I came across an archived post where I state what I found:

DCH

DCHindley

If the Dynamic Duo were to spend as much time researching rather than writing huge mind-numbing knee jerk replies to the other's knee jerk replies, they might find out what I did waaaay back in this archived post:

Now, armed with some real data instead of ego driven brashness, I privately put the question to Steve Mason, whose response is partly relayed in this archived post:

DCH

LegionOnomaMoi

1) Why did you limit your search to "Jesus"? Josephus introduces many, many people, and identifies many, many, people.
2) I have gone through just about every patronymic in Josephus' Life, JW, and BJ. I have also gone through a large number of other methods of identification, including his use of "name", titles, origins, other family relations, etc. I've given some of those examples in this thread, but the simple fact is that typically in both Greco-Roman and Jewish society patronymics were a primary means of identification (especially in Jewish society and in Hebraic languages), and Josephus tends to rely heavily on those. When he doesn't, we find a great deal more variation than when he does.
The question isn't so much, at least as far as much of the debate is concerned, whether Josephus initially identifies his new characters, but the word order of identification. He clearly does identify James in AJ 20.200. The problem Spin has with it is the position of the name. Furthermore, when did you ask this? Because I own two books by Steve Mason, and in both of them he treats the James reference as genuine. In Josephus and the New Testament he has an entire section devoted the passage. He also offers several possible suggestions regarding the phrasing/word order.

I checked the dates. The book I mentioned was published in 1992. The other book of his I own is mostly reprints, but the first chapter (where, among other places, he does discuss the relevant passage) is original and the book was published in 2009. So it seems strange that, given he has publicly given his opinion in print, he declined to comment in private.

Toto

Jesus H. Christ.

We have the phrase "called Christ" which is, admittedly rare. But the only examples we have of its use are in Christian literature.

Can we start with that?

It's not the typical way that Christians referred to Jesus, but we have no evidence that anyone else ever used the phrase, outside of this contested instance in Josephus.

To use your librarian example, what are the odds of your shy introverted bookish woman being a librarian (a rare profession) versus her being the first astronaut to colonize Mars (a profession with 0 examples?)

You seem to have framed the issue as what a Christian would have written if that Christian wanted to insert a reference to Jesus. In that case, you can argue that it is more likely that a pious Christian would have referred to Jesus the Christ, son of God, or something similar. Your analysis might be wrong, because you have not taken into account Christian variations in Christian documents versus Christian interpolations into Jewish documents, but you would have an argument.

But that's not the question. We have a phrase that might have been interpolated, and we are asking what the probability of interpolation is.

I do not argue that statistics can show that it must have been an interpolation, but I think it is significant that it is a phrase that has been written by Christians, so a Christian interpolation cannot be ruled out on that basis; which can be combined with the probability that Josephus would refer to someone as Christ, which I think has to be very small.

thief of fire

Where else would you expect to see it?
What other character from history do you imagine would have been referred to that way. Do you have anyone?

Except in some extremely limited ways it's avery awkward way for a believer to refer to Jesus.
If you're a believer you don't go around referring to Jesus as someone who was "called christ". they say he was/is christ.

LegionOnomaMoi

We can, the problem is where we go from there. Hence the post about logical fallacies and biases in human cognition. This is also (FYI) the real basis for Bayesian models and where it is actually used (rather than Carrier and others who are beginning to use Bayesian logic in historiography, although Carrier is the only one I know who uses numbers the way he does).

If we start with what we have, we also have to include (in some sense) what we don't have. This is difficult to do exactly, but it is done all the time (not always well) in research using various methods. To give an illustration: our evidence for the use of this phrase is a bit like our evidence for evolution in a book written by a creationist who knows biology. The "facts" supporting the case for the theory of evolution are manipulated and obscured, while a whole lot of bullshit is piled on (some true, some bogus, but all specifically designed to frame the issue in a particular light such that ID or whatever comes out looking like "science" or evolution comes out looking like pseudo-science or both). Using only this to put together how actual biologists talk about evolutionary theory is...well...hopeless. But we can bet there is a whole lot we are missing. On the other hand, we have most of the arguments marshalled on the "creationist" side. So while all we can know about how real scientists talk about evolution is that we're missing virtually all of it, we know that we have a very good representation of what the other side says about evolution/creationism.

It's the same here. If we just start with what we have, and don't factor in what we don't have, we are liable to "reconstruct" a completely distorted view of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, we have more than enough to put together what creationists say.

Without knowing how non-christians responded to christians, apart from a few christian quotations or dialogues in which christians had non-christians speak, we have no idea whether lots and lots of non-christians talked about a Jesus called Christ or if none did, but we do know that the phrase is virually absent from every single source we have, and virtually every single source we have has either been written by christians or copied by them (or both).

So starting with what we do have, and knowing what we don't, what we end up with is a situation in which any christian scribe inserting this phrase into a text is massively unlikely, and not only unparalleled, but we find the reverse.

And to use this as the basis of anything other than "we have an extremely large unknown" is flawed. We can absolutely reconstruct christian terminology, as we have a more than adequate sample size. We can even reconstruct scribal alteration trends. What we can't do is know (as you say) how non-christians used the phrase, but we also cannot use this other than to say we have a large unknown.

That's not a parallel example. We're dealing with one set we know very well, and another with we know almost nothing of, other than that there is a lot we don't know (and we do know this, because apart from anything else, we have plenty of references to anti-christian texts). A better example would be to imagine that we knew the woman voted for obama. Which is more likely, that she is a democrat and a librarian, or a republican? It's far, far, far more likely she's a republican simply because the set of republicans who voted for obama is far greater than the set of librarians who are democrats.

I've framed it in a number of ways, from syntactical to pure probability. As I said in the other thread, I can make a statistical model which predicts that the Tacitus reference is a forgery far, far more easily than one which makes the Josephus reference even a fair possibility (the only way I've been able to is by weighting additions to the name Jesus, or Jesus Christ, or Christ, such that any addition at all should be considered a likely interpolation, but that is clearly inadequate).

I've taken into account the variation of ways in which all our documents, from various manuscripts passed down by christian hands, to documents written by christians which are not copied, have referred to Jesus. I thought I addressed this before, but your argument: "Your analysis might be wrong, because you have not taken into account Christian variations in Christian documents versus Christian interpolations into Jewish documents, but you would have an argument" is not actually sound. That is, we have rabbinic documents, post-temple Jewish writings, Roman writings, Philo, and numerous other manuscripts written by non-christians yet copied and preserved by christians. So we actually DO have a good idea concerning how manuscripts which were copied by christians, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not, were altered when it comes to Jesus. We have one clear example of such alteration. Christian scribes seem to have spent a great deal more time "editing" their own texts rather than others. These, they showed (unfortunately) much less interest in, and therefore we have far fewer manuscripts. But we still have a good collection of post-first century writings, preserved in manuscripts or in quotations. The back and forth among various so-called gnostic sects, new "cults" developed or morphed in response to christianity, and the response of the "orthodox" church is particularly interesting. It was thought, before the Nag Hammadi find, that much of what the "church fathers" said had to be greatly exaggerated, because it was too "bizarre". Turns out, they were pretty good at accurately reporting (albeit with plenty of biased commentary) the views they refuted. And as works like Philo or Plotinus and others were seen as worth keeping by christian scribes, we have any number of places in which insertions could have been made, but weren't.

In other words, to put it in much briefer terms, the reason we seem not to have any idea how christians altered "Jewish" texts is because it seems they didn't, or at least they didn't do so when it came to references to Jesus. From a statistical standpoint, that actually tells us quite a bit.

Any phrase may be interpolated. The first question is: why are we asking whether this phrase is? Take, for example, the way Spin dealt with the other "marked" examples I gave. He created reasons to explain them. For any given line, we can always say it may have been interpolated. And as far as mythicism is concerned, it seems as if that's the default position when it comes to references to Jesus, but not the default position in general (how could it be, unless one wishes to say that we can glean nothing from any ancient texts?). If the reason we are asking the question is that the phrase happens to appear in a few christian examples, then we have a pretty big problem, as the NT is a fairly large collection, and there are A LOT of phrases which appear in so many of our texts. So we don't start with saying that it might have been, but asking what reason we might have to think so. And if the answer is that we find the phrase used in christian texts, then we determine whether or not it is christian or likely to be used by christians or likely to be added into a text by christians. And the way we do this is by looking at whether or not christians used the phrase, altered texts to make the phrase appear, and used the phrase in a way that differered from other groups. In this case, we don't know much about other groups, but we do know about christian usage, and this isn't christian usage. We have more reason to think that referring to Jesus as a blasphemer is christian than we do to think that the phrase "called Christ" is christian or likely to be used (in a text or in a textual alteration) by a christian.

That's true, it can't be ruled out completely, but with history nothing much can. But to say it is significant because it exists in christian texts is faulty. The same is true of clearly non-christian phrases. You have to combine the examples with the total population. Your reasoning is what is behind the lottery. You can't rule out the fact that you might have the lucky number, but you can be pretty darn sure you don't. The difference is that here we're looking at lottery picks after the fact. We can see the one in a million winner. But that doesn't mean we ignore the losers when calculating the probability.

He didn't refer to anyone "as" christ. I don't think there is enough evidence at all to support a fairly standard "so-called Christ" translation, but that is quite different from saying that Josephus referred to Jesus "as Christ". He did in Ant. 18., and that's why we know that, at the very least, it's corrupted. That is Christian usage. Here, he merely identifies Jesus.