Grog

You are making assumptions about what the "only logical reason" and "their motivation" might have been. Toto offered another plausible solution which I find persuasive, in that, IF SH's theory were true, there could be identfiable plausible solutions other than the one you have identified. I do not believe SH's theory has been demonstrated though.

Grog

I prefer to just ignore some people without putting them on ignore. Just don't bother.

stephan huller

I am at work but let me say again that Clement's testimony is not interpretation. It is data.

andrewcriddle

"Paul" does mean small or little. "Atomos" can mean small but I'm doubtful whether this is its primary sense. See Perseus Atomos

Andrew Criddle

Grog

Thank you for that link.

Duke Leto

I guess that's the case. I have to admit I know nothing about Marcion other than what I read in Doherty and I have no interest in reading the epistles. Stephan's assertion I was responding to was that his 2nd Century Josephus/Hegesippus was a Jewish Chistian writing a Jewish history to combat Marcionite distortions about Judaism. If so, why write one that makes God the author of the destruction of the Temple as a punishment for Jewish sins? That plays into the Marcionite's hands, doesn't it?

maryhelena

Its more a case, re Stephan Huller, that his proposed forgery of the Josephan writings centers around what that Josephan writer has written about Agrippa II. Agrippa II being Stephan's Real Messiah. Stephan's view of Marcion is that Marcion is Agrippa II - therefore, Marcion/Agrippa II is the Real Messiah. It's the Christians that Stephan is after - not the 'heretic' Marcion - who for him is the Real Messiah. It's the orthodox Christians who have turned the Real Messiah into a Pariah. i.e. the motive being the Christians want JC for a messiah - therefore they must make a Pariah out of Agrippa II/Marcion.

http://frommessiahtopariah.blogspot....price.html?m=1

stephan huller

I am still trying to understand the difficulty that people have with the almost universally acknowledged fact that Clement is saying that a writer named Flavius Josephus wrote a History of the Jews in 147 CE. Is it the word 'then' or 'next' which is giving you guys palpitations?

The word is always used this way in the chronicles to join one thing to another. Such as we see earlier in another text used by Clement in the same book:

The 'then' or 'next' isn't a break here or a separation but used in the same source in order to break up the monotony just like an English writer or speaker would say 'next' or 'then' in common speech.

stephan huller

A closer example to the way Josephus uses εἶτα in relation to Josephus's chronology. In chapter 19 of the same book he uses εἶτα to indicate the quote that follows is connected with what was cited earlier:

Clement is continuously citing from the LXX of Proverbs chapter 9 hence the use of 'then' or 'next.' http://books.google.com/books?id=MQs...ace%22&f=false

Is there any more to this? I keep coming back to this because it is so obvious. Clement is citing continuously from the text of Josephus he has in front of him. Yield.

Duke Leto

I know a couple of things about antiquities fraud, I've seen some pretty famous forgeries debunked. Modern forgers work for money, ancient Christian forgers worked for authority. Small gains for small stuff will pay the bills, but if you want to make the big bucks you have to go large. In documentary forgery the gold standard is the "Donation of Constantine", from which the popes derived their claim to rule, which purported to hand over the Western Empire to the Popes on Constantine's authority. The popes used this document to vaunt their to superiority over the remaining patriarchs until 1460ish when of the humanist popes realized that the whole thing was ridiculous and debunked it.

A similar trick that was very popular in Medieval France was for monasteries to forge grants of privileges from previous French kings, so that when Royal tax collectors came knocking they had something to wave in their faces to get rid of them. These are usually detected as frauds by comparison to actual attested documents of the same type, and it's the font that usually gives it away. (I get this from Marc Bloch if anyone cares.)

Point is that whenever the Christians made something up it was always to bolster their own claims of authority.

Now Stephan hadn't hashed out his theory in much detail at the time the post you quote was made, and I hadn't remembered the importance of the infancy narrative contradiction which really blows the timeline for the Gospel of Luke he proposes out of the water. (Justin Martyr, basically contemporary with Clement mentioned the Census of Quirinius, which strongly suggests he had a copy of Luke or Proto-Luke with material from Josephus or Hegesippus at that time.)

Even so the argument wasn't QUITE an argument from incredulity, it was an argument from the absence of any analogous Christian forgery with that degree of subtlety and restraint.