stephan huller

Hegesippus is usually said to be the first Christian chronicler. He wrote five books on something and Clement called it History of the Jews while Eusebius later identified it as a hypomnemata. My guess is that the change of name reflects the emergence of our familiar Josephan corpus in the interim

We know (or can guess) that the Fifth book had all the Christian info. It was here that the Jerusalem bishops list appeared. I am eating right now but my memory says that all citations were from book 5. the real question is wtf filled up the rest of the book. My guess is a proto-edition of Jewish Wars but one which continued to discuss the persecution of Christians and Jesus family in particular (see Eusebius Church History)

stephan huller

My wife is going to hit me with a rolling pin if I keep texting but the easiest explanation for while the text was changed was because the original sucked. That's how it is with writing. Keep at it til you get it fight (or your wife gets mad)

Duke Leto

Why place the Christian history separate from Jewish history? Why write the things from a non-Christian viewpoint? Why start from a document written by a real person, or if you were just innocently expanding the hyponomena in 147 CE before Eusebius or whoever got a hold of it the next century, why not start from scratch with a person you just made up?

If it's so damned critical to forge the Josephan canon to authenticate Christian legends why turn around and misplace it for ~1500 years? The Donation of Constantine was kept out in the open.

Still makes no sense unless you have an a priori need for Josephus to be generally inaccurate.

stephan huller

But Hegesippus is said to have been "Jewish Christian." He likely saw Christianity as an extension of Judaism after the destruction

stephan huller

I never said christianity was "seperate." The chronology unfolded chronologically hence all of what we'd identify as the Christian stuff was in book 5.

Clement though calls it a history of the Jews

Duke Leto

The Christian Stuff isn't in the received Canon now. The Antiquities goes chronologically up to the destruction of the temple. The Christian Stuff goes chronologically before the destruction of the Temple.

The 4 out of 5 volumes thing you quoted above won't work in that scenario.

Even if Hegesippus or some anonymous person revising Josephus' Hyponema just concentrated on political history and ignored the Christian Stuff then when Eusebius or whoever grabbed it and used it as "proof" of Christ, then why didn't Eusebius go ahead and add some more garbage? (Earl Doherty thinks he did just that.)

On that note, there's another thing you've forgotten. Jesus Mythicists don't see any reason to believe that Acts was in circulation by 147 CE, and if not how would they have known to put in the Jewish Drusilla?

You NEED to have a logical reason why the Synergoi/Hegespippus or the later church fathers didn't go ahead and put in more stuff that would corroborate their case. They're Church Fathers, not chess masters! They were not thinking: "A ha! In 1800 years, sinners may have figured out that the Gospels are fabricated nonsense, but if we're very restrained, we can convince them that this mostly fabricated history is genuine by NOT putting in any Gospel stories!" These people were manipulative liars! They'd embed a verbatim copy of Matthew into the Antiquities if they thought there was any chance of their getting away with it.

stephan huller

None of the points you bring up disproves the evidence of the existence of a josephan text of 147 known to Clement, epiphanius et al. You have a curious demand for absolute knowledge about things. Usually that's the sign of a religious mind. There are limits to what is knowable. Yet the evidence suggests the existence of a commonly held text. The question of what its exact shape was is a debatable point

Duke Leto

Since nothing you've posted precludes the existence of Josephus' full received canon by 95 CE with Hegesippus as a completely different Christian author using him as source on chronology with a citation...

...and the scenario you've laid out is much more complicated and requires your actors to either do things for no reason in forging elaborate set of documents that does almost nothing to corroborate their holy books or to show uncharacteristic intelligence in adding only enough to convince readers that some parts of the holy books are accurate without damaging the credibility of the documents themselves....

...well I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor says Josephus being Josephus is the obvious choice.

Especially since if we go the simplest and most obvious route, say that the thing started as a hypomena by "Joseph" after the Jewish War, that it was translated and expanded by Josephus/Hegesippus in 147 CE and that these books were taken by Eusebius and popularized and Josephus with only minimal additions... then that would mean that the portions derived from the hypomena and your synergoi's historical research that don't corroborate Christian history might well be considered accurate. Your hated Drusilla daughter of Herod Agrippa I might well be authentic anyway.

Let me put my problems simply:

You burst in here screaming "Josephus is a 2nd Century Christian Forgery!" (with a pretty shoddy case backing it up) and you have consistently refused to answer the obvious questions:

1) "Why would they do that?"
2) "Why should I care?"

You have yet to present any coherent reason why the Church Fathers would try to forge a Josephus that only partially confirms the NT narrative (and actually seem to suggest that they took out some corroboration that was there, which would be insane). Nor for that matter can you be bothered to explain how they would have put this forgery over on the Greco-Roman intellectuals or the Rabbinical community prior to Theodosius. These are questions you have to answer.

You haven't told us why Josephus being a forgery matters. What new model of Roman/Jewish/Christian history in the 1st century do you want us to accept? Just running in and screaming that a major source is phony doesn't tell us anything about how history really was.

If maryhelena is correct that your problem is the existence of Herod Agrippa I makes it impossible for Herod Agrippa II to be the Messiah... <edit>.

stephan huller

The facts are that the earliest text of Josephus that we come across that looks, smells and reads like our fourteenth century manuscripts of Josephus is in the fourth century. The person most intimately associated with that text is Eusebius. He promotes the text at the expense of Justus of Tiberias's chronology and calls the Five Books of 'Hegesippus' (which is only a corrupt way of saying Josephus) hypomnemata i.e. an unfinished 'outlines' or notebooks presumably because they could be argued to resemble the 'finished text' he promoted in the fourth century.

The facts are that both Clement and Origen represent our earliest 'looks' at a more original version of 'the History of the Jews' by 'Flavius Josephus.' The material that is cited by Origen takes an interest in Christianity - i.e. James the brother of Jesus. Can this be coincidence too? I doubt you are even familiar with Origen's citations from Josephus. Take a second look at those quotes and tell me that it is impossible that the earliest copies of Josephus were 'Christianized.'

I think that your unfamiliarity with the evidence leads you to uphold the idea that Eusebius's text (= our text) goes directly back to the first century. It is not Clement's second century Josephus which is a revision of our text but instead our text, likely developed in the fourth century, which is a further refinement of that 'History of the Jews' written in 147 CE. People have been wrestling with the problem of the three books of Josephus (Vita, Jewish War and Antiquities) for generations. Many have noted that an ur-text lies beneath the chronology of all three. Cohen and others have identified this as a hypomnema - the very same word that Eusebius uses to describe the text of 'Hegesippus' i.e. the second century 'History of the Jews' known to Clement of Alexandria. No one can possibly claim to have absolute knowledge about the exact inter-relatedness of this/these lost text(s), nevertheless there is IMO a very strong case to be made that 'proto-Christians' (perhaps even 'Jewish Christians') had a hand in shaping this hypomnema. The survival of the Testimonium Flavianum, references to Simon Magus, James the brother of Jesus and the like are easier to explain with this assumption.

I recommend that you look at English translations of the Latin Hegesippus and the Slavonic Josephus and - if you can read Hebrew - the Yosippon and take notice of the manner in which there is clear layering of 'Josephus' the author writing about Josephus the first century rebel commander in the third person. This is not a function of a late revision of our text but rather our text being a late revision of a second century Christian 'History of the Jews' written in the name of 'Josephus' which was further refined in order to give it credibility against Justus of Tiberias's first person account of what really went on in the first century. That history apparently contained no reference to Jesus or Christians (although this latter point is only inferred by Photius's testimony about the lack of any references to Jesus).

There can be no doubt that Christians and Jews learned to interpret the destruction of the Jewish temple by means of Daniel chapter 9. This prophesy is at the core of our surviving text of Josephus. Theoretically at least either a Jew or a Christian could have been responsible for developing this history as 'living theology.' Nevertheless it must be noted that Justin of Tiberias was unlikely to have mixed theology so directly in his composition. He was a respected authority on Plato, his works being cited later in Diogenes Laertius. His original chronology must necessarily have been a superior historical and scientific account of the causes of the war. Why didn't it survive? The answer is probably connected to the aforementioned preference for 'Josephus.' Josephus better served Christian interests than Justin. This wasn't accidental as I have already noted - our 'Josephus' was a second century Christian.

tanya

So, did Photius have an agenda, in explaining that Justus did not mention Jesus? More to the point, do our extant copies of the 9th century leader of the eastern, orthodox branch, reflect interpolation, perhaps from Muslim invaders, or other political forces attacking Constantinople? What is the condition of the extant manuscripts of Photius? Who looked after the texts, when the Muslims overran Constantinople?