stephan huller

I don't understand the comment. The Khazars an eastern European people who were converts to Judaism. My relatives used the term khazerim in the pejorative sense to denote the inferiority and undesirability of eastern European Jewry - i.e. they weren't really Jewish. The government of Iran has picked up on this and used it for its propaganda against the state of Israel.

Duke Leto

Yeah, you're pretty much setting yourself up for a flame war accusing you of anti-Semitism. So good luck with that.

stephan huller

I am Jewish so let them fire away. I just take issue with the manner in which Israeli scholarship pretends that Josephus is a road map to 'their history' or the history they share with evangelicals - the people who make all this 'research' they engage in possible. This embodies the same approach to the New Testament material among Christian scholars. I don't know how to say this without sounding resentful but there is a type of person that decides to make a career in religious scholarship. I probably am paraphrasing Nietzsche here but this kind of person likes to stuff and categorize living complexities as dead simplicities. This psychological profile needs to have everything organized into neat groups in order to be happy. So it is that they overlook the problems inherent with Acts as a source. Their minds works this way:

Sure they will concede 'Acts is imperfect.' But what I am getting at is that there is a psychological 'switch' which turns their mind off when it comes to doubting Acts as a source. What overrides any concerns is the 'prime directive' as a scholar - we need a source.

The same thing goes on with respect to Josephus. How accurate is Josephus? I havent' a fucking clue. Is it 70% percent accurate? 60% accurate? The point is that none of us knows. We have almost nothing to compare it to. It was chosen as our designated 'source' for Jewish history just as Acts was chosen to explain the development of the Church.

I am sure if we had even the source material that was acceptable to second and third century Fathers - Hegesippus, Justus etc - we would quickly realize how much conflicting information was contained in all these narratives. We can already see Photius reference the conflicts between Justus and Josephus (something apparently also at the core of the material in Vita).

Another example that people should be aware of - jumping tracks here - is that there exists this strange text called 5 Maccabees which acts a parallel history to Josephus, does not know Josephus but I think it was used by the compiler of Josephus as one of his sources. I will try to put a link later.

My thing is to just say 'maybe Josephus' is right. Maybe. He's not right. He's just maybe until we find supplementary evidence which backs up his claims and no dissenting witnesses as 5 Maccabees often is.