Kosh

And for very good reason. You might do to actually read something about the topic, Magus.

Peter Kirby

The material on Jesus constitutes less than 0.01% of Josephus, so I've allowed for other interpolations, perhaps not all detectable. The stuff written about Jesus includes "He was the Christ," while Origen (100 years before Eusebius) tells us that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Christ. Do you believe that Josephus wrote the entire Testimonium? If not, then you have nothing much to criticize atheists about here--Christians did interpolate material on Jesus into Josephus.

Besides, what do you expect? Christians controlled the manuscripts. Josephus wrote 20 books on Jewish history and another 7 books on the events leading up to and including the Jewish revolt in the first century. His silence on Jesus would be a major embarrassment that would not be left uncorrected. Indeed, the Testimonium passage is a factor in why we are fortunate enough to have manuscripts of the Antiquities today (and not, say, Justus of Tiberias). This doesn't prove inauthenticity, but authenticity can't just be assumed here.

You're sidetracking the discussion, which was about the "slaughter of the innocents" myth in the Gospel of Matthew. We know that Josephus wrote nothing about it in his history of Herodian times. Christians certainly wouldn't leave it out if he did. And, besides, there is at least one way in which I would accept its authenticity: if Josephus recorded the massacre without knowing that it was connected to Christ and the magi. A Christian interpolator wouldn't be likely to leave that out. That's part of the reason that the passage about John the Baptist is accepted: Christians see John simply as the forerunner of Christ, while the passage in Josephus doesn't mention Jesus at all. (If the manuscripts of Josephus recorded both the massacre and tied it to the Virgin Birth of Jesus, I'd wonder whether Josephus was not actually a Christian--as Whiston and others believed. But there's not much good in speculating on what isn't the case.)

And, of course, you have lumped together atheists as all discounting any trace of Jesus in Josephus. This is not the case; Morton Smith, for example, thought that Josephus wrote something about Jesus.

best,
Peter Kirby

Tercel

Bethlehem Kosh, not Israel. There's a bit of a difference - one's a tiny town, the other's a country. And it wasn't the "first born" he's supposed to have killed either: he is said to have ordered the boys aged two and under to be killed.

Only Matthew mentions the order to kill the infants.

Well there are Paul's quotes that Jesus was born "of a woman" (Gal 4:4) and "the spirit" (I seem to have lost this reference). Then there's evidence from other early Christian documents such as the Protoevangelism of James which testify to a belief in Mary's virginity.
The story of Herod's command to kill the children is supported by evidence about his character from sources such as Josephus - it is an act consistent with his known character.

Why would Mark consider it a central doctrine of Christianity? The virgin birth is not a central doctrine, but a consequence of our belief in the divinity of Christ.

Why would he know of it necessarily? Do you think Herod went around proclaiming that a great king had been born and Herod was out to get him?
How many children did Herod actually kill in this huge slaughter? Does anyone actually know the size of Bethlehem at the time? 100? 200? 500? If there were 200 people living in Bethlehem with ages and gender equally distributed between 0 and 40 then that means there would be 5 boys between 0 and 2.
So here we have the slaughter of 5 babies in some backcountry village nobody cared about by a King renowned for his involvement in a mass slaughter of all ages earlier in his reign and for burning someone alive and killing his son at the end of his reign. And you ask why this didn't make the history books?

:notworthy

There were other mistakes in your post originally?
Was anything in the original actually true?

Peter Kirby

Tercel: "If there were 200 people living in Bethlehem with ages and gender equally distributed distributed between 0 and 40 . . ."

Age in the ancient world was certainly not evenly distributed. It would be much higher at age 0-1 than age 40-41. This is still true today, though not to the same extent in industrialized nations. Here are some statistics from an essay written a hundred years ago.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/SFL/infant...lity_rates.htm
"In the British Lying-In Hospital from 1750 to 1759 the mortality was 6.5 per cent. of the infants.[9] Percival,[l3] writing in 1789, states that in Manchester half the children born die before reaching the fifth year. A writer in a French medical journal,[14] in l780, makes the statement that in that country half the children born died before the end of the second year. At this time, the latter half of the eighteenth century, we are warranted in stating that the infant mortality generally was over one-fourth of the total mortality, and the mortality under five years over half the total mortality."

The conditions would have been worse in first century Palestine. There is an article on Infant Mortality in The Land of Israel in Late Antiquity.

A reasonable estimate would be that about 25% would die by 2, about 50% by 5, about 75% by 40, and about 100% by 80. I will skew the estimates in favor of older deaths, and simplify calculations, by saying that the deaths happen at ages 2, 5, 40, and 80. People in each group will have been 0-2 years old, but the percentage of the time spent in that age bracket varies by age. 25% spend 100% of their time from 0-2, 25% spend 40% of their time from 0-2, 25% are under two for 5% of their lives, and 25% are under two for 2.5% of their lives. The percentage of the time that total population spends under two is 25% * 100% + 25% * 40% + 25% * 5% + 25% * 2.5%, or .25 + .1 + .0125 + .00625 or 37.5%. This means that an average of 375 out of 1000 people are under age two at any given time in ancient Israel (though the numbers will vary in some places--a Qumran type community, for example, could have no children).

That was a fun math problem. Please check the logic for me and point out any flaws. (Not just Tercel, if anyone else spots an error.)

The only indications of the size of Bethlehem of which I know are that it had an inn (Luke 2:7) and that it is mentioned by Josephus several times (Ant. 5.2.8, 5.8.13, 5.9.1, 5.9.2, 6.8.1, 6.8.2, 6.11.7, 7.1.3, 7.12.4, 8.2.3, 8.10.1). Josephus consistently refers to Bethlehem as a "polis," i.e. a city. This and the fact that the city boasted an inn suggests a modest population of 500 or more. Does anyone know anything about the archaeology of Bethlehem? That would probably be the deciding factor.

My estimate therefore is about 500 * 37.5% * 50% = about 94 boys (or more for a higher population of Bethlehem and the vicinity). Using your population figure of 200, which seems low (only about twenty families?), it is still at least 38. In any case, the assumption that only 5% of the population was under age two is erroneous.

best,
Peter Kirby

Tercel

Peter I agree the ages are going to be skewed towards the lower numbers, but I hoped I was adequately accounting for this by my counter assumption that the highest age was 40. (Since we know that lots of people did live well past 40)

I really have no idea how big Bethlehem was, I was just guessing. 500 or a 1000 seems equally possible. Though if it really only had one inn, it can't have been particularly large.

I'm very supicious about your math method (though I'm not sure how it should be calculated) and the suggestion that the death rate was necessarily as high as that europe during the industrial revolution.
Frankly, your results seem ludicrous: Over one person in three was under 2?? That's over one child under two per two other people! Was every person over two married with child under two? Or did most couples have multiple children under two at once? (Is this possible when you start taking into account the likelihood of unsuccessful births and death during those two years?)

Peter Kirby

Though the figure of 37.5% cannot be taken exactly, the general idea holds true from an anthropological standpoint: people in the ANE just about always thought that more children were a good thing (especially boys), as many as could be supported (it's a sign of status), but most of these children died by age 5, from various causes, including malnutrition and disease. I would expect that the typical family would have a pregnancy every year. If half the women over 2 were over 14 or so (and the other half 3-13), then about half the women over 2 were married. A birth every year would also yield a high figure from this separate approach.

I would be willing to adjust it downward to about 25%, as there is a fudge factor, but I don't think that infant mortality was lower in ancient Israel than in 1800s Europe, and besides the other article linked was specifically about Israel. In any case, again, the distribution is not even but heavily populated by young children. What do you think the average year of death was for the person born in the first century? Including infant mortality and all forms of death.

I think that a significant problem with the method of calculation used above is that it assumes that everyone reaches a second birth day, when indeed many would have died within days of birth. A more accurate figure could be achieved with a method that figures in a curve of age at death, starting high at birth and smoothing out towards old age. And, of course, if anyone else has references on the rate of mortality, those would be welcome.

Another problem is that I have been thinking that the ages of the children massacred were 0 and 1, while the NAB says "two years old and under." Furthermore, what do you say when the soldier comes by, blood on his sword, asking whether your child is under three? The orders must have been to go by sight, which means erring on the safe side. Also, the text says "Bethlehem and its vicinity," not just the city. These considerations would increase the figure.

best,
Peter Kirby

Kosh

Piss off, Tercel. As indicated, I was being nagged while trying to type and think.


Well there are Paul's quotes that Jesus was born "of a woman" (Gal 4:4) and "the spirit" (I seem to have lost this reference). Then there's evidence from other early Christian documents such as the Protoevangelism of James which testify to a belief in Mary's virginity.

This is ridiculous reasoning, and you know it.

Exactly. You have decided he's divine, and then backed into the virgin birth belief.

Vinnie

Tercel, please stop defending the account of the slaughtering of the innocents. It can't be done and its bad for PR

You are agnostic on so many issues concerning Jesus, on what grounds can you claim "The story of Herod's command to kill the children is supported by evidence about his character from sources such as Josephus - it is an act consistent with his known character."?

That is not evidence. His brutal insanity would also make him the prime example to insert into such a fabricated story. Jospehus, who deals extensively on Herod's idiocy does not mention this incident. We have good reason to suspect that he would have had he known about it. Please don't cite Holding's nonsense in response to this!

"The statement that all Jerusalem was startled over the birth of the King of the Jews and that there was widespread awareness of the King's birth at Bethlehem (Herod, chief priests, scribes, and, to their regret, the people of Bethlehem) conflicts with the Gospel accounts of the public ministry where the people in Nazareth do not know this and are amazed that Jesus has special pretensions (Mark 6:1-6 and par.) and where people in Jerusalem do not know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (John 7:40-42). According to the synoptic Gospels (Mark 6:14-16 and par.), Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, despite the measures his father is supposed to have taken against Jesus, is perplexed by Jesus and seems to have no previous knowledge of him." (Brown)

Finally, hardly anything in the birth narratives gan be promoted by positive historical evidence. They contradict at numerous points and much of the material is late and receives only single attestation. The material is too problematic for any sort of historical use as well. The Jbap mateiral in Luke is so obviously polemicized towards presenting the superiority of Jesus over JBaop it is impossible to use. Luke and Matthew contradict blatently on the Nazareth/Bethlehem issue:
http://www.acfaith.com/infancyerror.html

The birth narratives shouldn't even be debated anymore. They are for theologians, not historians.

Vinnie

Gooch's dad

The other bit in Matthew that IMO discredits the author is the triumphal entry on two donkeys, in verse 21:7. I've seen fundies try to explain this away by saying that Jesus was sitting on "them" meaning the disciples' clothes, but that is special pleading. Any 3rd grader could read that verse and see what it meant. The writer misunderstood the Hebrew "prophecy" and use of double description.

Tercel

I'll defend whatever I like...
Bad for PR? This is the sec-web Vinnie.

I'm just being properly skeptical of skepticism. You seem convinced the event did not happen. That seems a bit strange to me: Why? Is there a case for its non-event beyond an argument from the silence of Josephus?

Why should Josephus have known about it if it was true? Do you think Herod went around announcing the fact that he had tried to killed God's promised Messiah?
I'm unconvinced Josephus does deal "extensively" on Herod's idiocy.
The problem with arguments from silence is that the certainty of the conclusion hinges on all of the premises, and hence these things I'm largely unconvinced about need to be proved pretty thoroughly.
For example, I'm prepared to grant that there's about a 70% probability that Josephus would have known had the event occured and a 70% probability that Josephus would have written about it if he'd known. But this means Josephus had only a 49% chance of writing about the event if it happened, and therefore the fact that he didn't write about it isn't very strong evidence against it at all.

I can't cite Holding's nonsence because I don't read Holding's nonsence. I've read enough of it before to know it's nonsence.

I agree. However, there is a big difference between the historicity of the material being unprovable and generally difficult to extract anything solid from using historical techniques, and its being false. Remember, the historical Jesus is not the real Jesus.