andrewcriddle

I'm not sure of the problem.

Eusebius seems to be saying that he could find a list of the Bishops of Jerusalem but no indication of their length of office or the dates when they were appointed and died. This would contrast with Rome Antioch and Alexandria where Eusebius seems to have had access to documents with enough chronological information to allow specific dating.

(IMO this chronological evidence in the documents used by Eusebius was of very dubious historical value but that is another matter.)

Andrew Criddle

spin

I don't see any "exactly" here. I see an attempt not to deal with the gospel evidence as provided in the earthly origin of Jesus as a son of David.

I haven't said that the use of the adelphonymic was impossible. But you seem to be mixing up a qualifier for James with a qualifier for Jesus. It is James who gets the adelphonymic. Nothing out of the norm was claimed about James. He would have had a father.

The adelphonymic is a less usual qualifier and nowhere else fronted as in the case under examination.

What can I do with your thoughts here?

You dismiss the importance of dating in this assertion. If you cannot date it, its relevance cannot be shown.

Agreed.

The identification begins with him being worthy of note among the Jews. This is followed by a somewhat strangely worded patronymic.

Of your list, the only one, beside Pliny, that doesn't give any indications of irregularity is Lucian, who helps us understand the problems hinted at in the Didache regarding itinerant preachers, but then Lucian is in the latter art of the 2nd c.

The TF looks like a christian forgery and was seen as such for centuries. It's only these latter times when an attempt has been made to sanitize the passage, through arbitrary omission (the "I don't like this bit, but the other is ok" approach).

Your only response to dealing with the compound problem surrounding the James reference is the divide-and-conquer approach which doesn't try to consider the compound issue. Hey, adelphonymic references do occur in Josephus, but where else is it fronted? Ummm.... And then given Josephus's avoidance of use of christos why does he only use it for Jesus? The hilarious response is because that's what he was called! What Jews would ever have called a dead man "christos"? Being dead guaranteed that he wasn't the messiah in Jewish eyes. And Josephus was a Jewish apologist for the Jewish people and of a priestly family.


spin

Ben C Smith

Not so:

James was typically called the brother of the Lord; Jesus was typically called the son of God (and even son of David does not betray the name of his father). Neither of these would give Josephus a paternal name for James (or for Jesus).

This presumes that Josephus had a mental rule: Use adelphonymics occasionally, and front patronymics, but never front adelphonymics. Such a mental rule is purely arbitrary. And that is why it is overqualification.

Hilarious or not, that is indeed what the Romans called him. And Josephus was writing for Romans.

Ben.

Solitary Man

I think in addition to my already added leanings that Hebrews was post-70, this past SBL had a session on Jewish Christianity which included Kenneth L. Schenck's paper Hebrews and the Parting of the Ways which was utterly convincing that Hebrews was certainly post-70.

Ben C Smith

You may be correct about Hebrews.

I would be interested in seeing you start a thread detailing why you are utterly convinced of a post-70 dating for the epistle, listing both your own reasons and those of Schenck.

Ben.

Solitary Man

Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of Schenck's paper. I heard it read in San Diego.

Doug Shaver

I got careless. I should have written, "All that mattered was that the scribe could have thought it was realistic . . . ."

Your argument, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that forgery is an implausible hypothesis because it presumes a certain belief on the scribe's part, and that we can reasonably assume that no Christian scribe would have held any such belief.

Obviously, you and I have very different notions about what is plausible and what may constitute a reasonable assumption. That being noted, I think further debate would be futile.

Toto

Schenck discusses his paper here but I didn't find a copy online.

Ben C Smith

Thanks, Toto. Unfortunately, I did not find anything on that blog about the date of Hebrews.

Solitary Man, might I persuade you to summarize, then, your own points in favor of dating Hebrews after 70, perhaps including observations that your memory of the SBL paper has informed? You can use IIRC liberally, if you wish, so that no one can accuse you of misquoting.

Ben.

jjramsey

No, I am saying that the scenarios that you describe are implausible because they demand a level of thoughtlessness from our hypothetical scribe that is inconsistent with the cleverness that he displayed in the purported forgery.