It seems that responding to all the claims being made in this thread at such a remarkable rate would be a full time job, and I already have one of those, but I'll try to get back to as many of at least the more substantiated ones I haven't responded to already. Of course, that tends to generate more replies with even more such claims, making these kinds of threads an almost endless labour.
Still, since there seem to be a few genuine rationalists here who actually carefully consider both sides of an argument, I'll press on ...
This leaves us with the James brother of Jesus passage. By the various temporal markers Josephus has in the entire passage we know this James died c64 CE by stoning. Problem is by Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Early Christian tradition ie basically everybody else the James brother of the Gospels Jesus died c70CE by being thrown from a battlement, stoned, and finally clubbed to death by passing laundrymen. (again, insert your own tasteless clean death joke)
There's a problem in there somewhere? I'm afraid I can't see it. Josephus, who was a contemporary of James and who was either in Jerusalem at the time of his execution or returned there from a mission to Rome very soon afterwards, says that the Sanhedrin "sentenced (James and some others) to be stoned" but gives no account or details of the execution beyond that. Hegesippus and Clement, writing later in the Second Century, go into more detail, with both describing James being "thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple" (Clement), though with Hegesippus going into much more detail and specifies that he was stoned when he was found not to be dead. And both also mention the distinctive detail of the coup de grace being administered by a fuller (singular, so not "laundrymen"). Eusebius' much later account is irrelevant, because he simply quotes Clement and Hegesippus.
So where is the problem? Josephus doesn't describe the execution and Clement and Hegesippus do, so of course they are going to have details of the execution that Josephus doesn't have. Big deal. Josephus gives a bald sequence of events, which are parenthetical to what he is talking about, while Clement and Hegesippus give a hagiographical matyrology. As we'd expect. They overlap on the key point: he was executed by the Temple priests in Jerusalem and he was stoned. The hagiographical details are irrelevant beyond that.
More over, "(t)he Bible uses the term "christ" or "messiah"for a variety of figures, including all of the high priests and kings of ancient Israel" (Wright, Stuart A. (1995) Armageddon in Waco University of Chicago Presspg 296) and "In a characteristic typological reading he asserts that Moses himself was the first to recognize the glory of the name of Christ because he applied this title (in Greek as in the Hebrew, mashiah means simply "the anointed one") to the High Priest" (Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim (1993) Freud's Moses Yale University Press pg 91)
Yes. And? I'm assuming you're trying to imply that this means that "Jesus who was called Messiah" is the same person as "Jesus, the son of Damneus" because the latter was anointed as High Priest. I'll show why that doesn't work in a moment. (And I'm not sure why your highlighting habit is applied to the fact Yerushalmi's book is published by the YUP - is this significant for some reason?)
The entire passage end with "Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest."
To be made high priest Jesus, the son of Damneus would have had to have been anointed ie he could have literally been nicknamed christ (with a little 'c') meaning this passage could be totally genuine and not have one thing to do with the Gospels Jesus!
Since you like highlights, I emphasised that word "
could " for you. He "could" have been referring to the "son of Damneus" with both of his references to "Jesus"? Well, he "could" have perhaps. But since you're arguing against the way this passage is usually read, simply adopting the usual Myther
modus operandi and waving around a mere "could" isn't good enough. You need to back up that flaccid little "could" with an argument by reference to the evidence.
For example, if you can show examples from the rest of Josephus'
opus where he seems to be referring to one person by two different referents (eg "the son of", "the brother of", "who was called" or gentilics referring to places of origin), you'd be able to bolster your case that this is what he is doing here. But you don't bother to do this. You simply wave around your mere, weak little "possible" and leave it at that.
And for good reason. A couple of years ago, tired of people substituting this feeble "possible" explanation for a real argument, I was kind enough to do their homework for them. I re-read Josephus'
Antiquities from beginning to end making note of all gentilics and referents and how Josephus uses them. What I found was the very
opposite of what you're suggesting. Josephus is very careful to be consistent in how he designates people, particularly when he is dealing with people with common names (Jesus, Matthais, Ananus) or names which are common in the families whose affairs he is describing.
For example, there are a number of people in his narrative who share the name "Alexander", since this was a common name across several generations of the Hasmonean Dynasty. So he is very careful that, once he introduces someone in a particular way, he continues to refer to them using the same referent so the reader can be sure of which "Alexander" he is talking about. Thus we find one of them is consistently referred to as "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" and nothing else. This king is mentioned in this way no less than six times in Book XIV (in XIV.5, XIV.6, XIV.7, XIV.12, XIV.13 and XIV.16) . What's notable here is that he calls him "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" rather than simply "Alexander" if he is mentioning him in that chapter
for the first time - after that he simply calls him Alexander, with no further referent. And he does this because he mentions several other Alexanders in the same book who he is careful to differentiate from "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" by calling them "Alexander, the son of Jason" and "Alexander, the son of Dositheus" (XIV.8), "Alexander, the son of Theodorus" ((XIV.10; 12). He is particularly careful to do this in Chapter 12 where he mentions both "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" and "Alexander, the son of Theodorus" within a few lines of each other, to be sure the reader is clear which of these various Alexanders is being referred to at each point.
I could give you dozens of examples of the same patterns of careful distinction and delineation being used by Josephus. It's odd, if you have actually read and studied Josephus' works that you aren't familiar with all this, but then I tend to find few Mythicists actually bother to get a detailed understanding of the source material they try to use - simply repeating what others have said about a few selected snippets seems to suffice for them.
So this means that the "possible" idea that Josephus is working contrary to his usual technique and is, bizarrely, confusing the reader by calling the
same person by two
different referents, is looking distinctly unlikely. Given there are no examples of his doing this elsewhere and given that we can see many, many examples of him carefully doing precisely the opposite, it becomes clear that this "possibilty" is not standing up to careful scrutiny. This is worsened by the fact that Josephus uses other ways to ensure his reader understands that he is referring again to someone mentioned earlier. For example, after having mentioned Antiochus Eupator:
" ... and then the forementioned Antiochus, and Lysias the general of his army, deprived Onias, who was also called Menelaus, of the high priesthood, and slew him at Berea." (XX.10)
Or having mentioned the tetrachs Philip and Agrippa:
" ... one of whom was Jacim, who was famous for his valor, and taught his Babylonians how to ride their horses; and a troop of them were guards to the forementioned kings." (XVII.2)
And there are plenty of other examples. All this indicates very clearly that Josephus was careful to ensure his readers
didn't confuse people who had the same name (since he had plenty of those in his narrative) and he made it very clear when he was referring once more to someone mentioned a little earlier. This is the opposite of what you're claiming. And you give no evidence, parallels or cognates to back your mere claim up at all.
But it gets worse. Not only does this odd reading of XX.9.1 go against everything we know about how Josephus delineated the figures he mentioned, it also makes no sense in the context of his narrative. If, as this reading requires, "Jesus who was called Messiah" is also "Jesus, son of Damneus" then Ananias is deposed and replaced with the brother of the man he had unlawfully executed. That there would be this kind of internecine feud within the priestly families and Josephus only mentions it, in passing and highly obliquely, in these few sentences is remarkable. He usually devotes whole chapters to this kind of thing and here, we're supposed to believe, he's lightly referring in passing to such a major clash just three years before the outbreak of the Jewish War and he barely mentions it?
But this stretches credulity even further if we do what many Mythicists don't bother to do and
read the rest of the chapter rather than this quarrelled-over snippet at the beginning of it. Josephus tells us that, despite being deposed, Ananias doesn't fade from the scene and contiues to weild great influence. This is because he is rich ("a great hoarder up of money") and so he uses his rich gifts so he "cultivated the friendship of Albinus, and of the high priest". But hang on - "the high priest" at this point is "Jesus, son of Damneus". If the High Priest is simply another Saduccee aristocrat like Ananias, this cosy-if-corrupt behaviour makes sense. But according to your odd reading, the High Priest is the brother of the guy Ananias had unlawfully executed. And now he's taking bribes and doing his brother's killer favours? That makes no sense.
However you cut it, you reading doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't fit how we know Josephus handled people with the same name in the same chapter, it doesn't fit his care in differentiating people if there is any scope for confusion and it doesn't make sense as a political scenario.
This is why no-one reads this passage this way. No-one except Jesus Mythers because ... well, we can all see why they have to find a way to spin it. Unless they do, their whole thesis collapses in a heap.
It helps to actually know the material.
