Originally Posted by spamandham

As was pointed out by another poster above, Antiquities is heavily based on the Jewish scriptures. I overgeneralized in the comment you referenced.

You may well be right on your point. If the same microscope were applied to say, The Jewish Wars, as has been to the Gospels, perspectives might well be different.

It may be outright fiction, it might be legend, it might be myth, or some combination. I haven't dug into this story enough to make an assessment. But assuming your analysis is solid, it means this story suffers the same problem as the Gospels (I'm focused on the Gospels right now), which is that we know the story as it stands simply isn't true, but we don't know whether or not there is a historical core.

However, the assumption that there is a historical core is unsupportable, and an unnecessary complication for this Theudas story (unless there is sufficient external evidence for some part of it). The same holds true for the Gospels. The proper starting point is "we don't know. so let's find out if there is a historical core" rather than "let's figure out what the historical core is".

-again, under the assumptions that your analysis is correct on this story, and that there is no external corroboration of parts of it.

If we can identify Josephus' motives for his various asunder stories, I think it's legitimate to assume that any story for which he would have a dishonorable motive, is probably not even close to being accurate. Is that reasonable?

Originally Posted by aa5874

Actually, the story about Theudas in Josephus does not have enough information to determine whether it is fiction or not. Ben's speculation about similarities of Theudas to passages in the OT are just conjectural.

Originally Posted by aa5874

Ben's speculation about similarities of Theudas to passages in the OT are just conjectural.

Originally Posted by Ben C Smith

The similarity between Fadus and company taking the head of Theudas to Jerusalem and David taking the head of Goliath to Jerusalem is conjectural? The similarity between Theudas promising to divide the river Jordan and Joshua actually dividing the river Jordan is conjectural?

Ben.

Originally Posted by aa5874

More conjecture.