Duke Leto

Well that's a start. Thank you for admitting there was something you were unaware of.

Problem is now that all of the scholars you just quoted were talking about the author of the "Pseudo-Hegesippus" document. You're passing that off as a consensus that the non-extant 2nd Century Church Historian Hegesippus referred to by the various Church Fathers (Were there ever any Church Uncles?) must have originated as a corruption of Josephus, and moreover that Pseudo-Hegesippus and 2nd Century Hegesippus are therefore the same thing.

From the cursory reading of the Hegesippus wiki article I made during our last spitting contest (the one it took one look at the disambiguation link to find Athenian Hegesippus from), no such consensus exists for conflating Josephus with Hegesippus with Pseudo-Hegesippus. The only person besides yourself to have suggested it appears to be Robert M. Price.

By the by, if I haven't already mentioned it, there's a possibility for Agrippa II having no children that you seen to have forgotten which is much simpler than castration. He might have been gay. That could explain a non-sexual closeness with Berenice that could easily have been misinterpreted as sexual to outside observers.

Maryhelena posted a quote from your tutor, from your site I believe, about your inadequate methodological rigor as a historian as opposed to a theologian. (He and I seem to share the attitude that theologians can pretty much make up whatever nonsense they want.) The Athenian Hegesippus is pretty emblematic of that.

You asserted as a piece of evidence that Hegesippus was not a genuine Greek name. You probably got that from someone else, my money's on Price. But you didn't stop before you made the assertion to think: "Is this accurate? I'd better double check." It took me five minutes of research to disprove it, and I doubt it would have taken you as long. If you had done your homework you'd not have been caught out making a gaffe.

If you intend to play around with History you need to do your homework, not just the things you want to prove but to disprove the objections other people are going to make. And you can't depend on what other people tell you, you need to drill down to their primary sources and replicate their work.

Here's a suggestion for a line of inquiry that may be useful:

You've asserted that the Talmud only talks about one Agrippa and it must be Agrippa II instead of the generally assumed Agrippa I. If there were two it would talk about both of them.

Go through the whole of the Talmud and find the references it makes to the various Kings of Israel and Judea. That would include the Davidic dynasty, the Jeroboam dynasty, the Omride dynasty, the Hasmoneans and the Herodeans. Good. Are they all attested? Any missing? Because if there's even one other malik not in the Talmud then some jerk like me is going to point to them as evidence that Agrippa II being missing from the Talmud is meaningless. (Especially since he was a traitor who helped destroy Jerusalem and the Temple.)

That's the kind of paranoid mindset you need to develop if you want to write quality history.

maryhelena

Did you forget to type not in this sentence?

stephan huller

thanks duke. i fail to see why my ignoring the ancient greek form of the name is decisive or even egregious. the consensus is that hegesippus comes from josephus. like most people in scholarship when the evidwnce supports your hypothesis just go with it

stephan huller

and i am honest enough to admit it and honest enough to publish dissenting views on my blog and engage detractors. how many people do that on a regular basis?

Duke Leto

Missing the point there tiger. The problem isn't that you made the mistake, the problem is you should have been good enough to catch yourself doing it.

Anything you had academically published about Herodian history as opposed to theological interpretations would have been ripped to pieces.

I really am trying to give you constructive advice here.

Incidentally you ignored my clarification on the difference between 2nd Century Hegesippus, where there isn't a consensus on a Josephus connection, and Pseudo-Hegesippus, where there is. I honestly don't know if you're intentionally repeating as proven fact things I've disputed (with implicit references) or there's some psychological blinder that keeps you from understanding that someone has found a hole in your theory that must be addressed.

stephan huller

i didnt ignore your clarification. the point is that the same corruptions would apply to both manuscript traditions. hegesippus is jewish and originally spoke aramaic

Duke Leto

Every single academic in every discipline that exists. Except for "publish dissenting views", we actually call it "peer review".

stephan huller

at a blog?

Duke Leto

And your authority on this is... Eusebius? The same Eusebius who polished all the Christian material out of the Greek text of "Josephus" that Hegesippus had written and then palmed it off as 1st Century Josephus?

Why should any of us believe anything about Hegesippus said by someone you want us to believe is a liar?

Duke Leto

In fact, a lot of them do. Very few people write blog posts as long as yours, though.