Once more unto the breach ....
Way back on Page 13 of this thread, Hans made one of his usual bold assertions, claiming that "nowhere else does (Josephus) use a meaningless translation" of a name we find in
Antiquities XX.9.1 where he translates the Aramaic word for "anointed (one)" into Greek as
Χριστοῦ. Because Hans has no real grasp of the source material, this claim was completely wrong. I demonstrated this by giving him three examples of Josephus doing precisely this:
" ... he should find them between Jerusalem and the ascent of Engedi, at a place called 'the Eminence', and that he should not fight against them."
(λεγομένης δ᾽ Ἐξοχῆς)
(Antiquities IX.1.2)
" ... Pacorus left with Herod two hundred horsemen, and ten men, who were called 'the Freemen' ..."
(δέκα τῶν λεγομένων ἐλευθέρων)
(Antiquities XIV.13.5)
"Jonathan and his colleagues .... raised a report of their own contrivance, that Roman horsemen were seen at a place called 'Union', in the borders of Galilee ... "
(κατὰ τόπον λεγόμενον Ὁμόνοιαν)
(Life 54)
I then noted that, like
Χριστοῦ ("the Anointed"), the words
Ἐξοχῆς ("the Eminence"),
ἐλευθέρων ("the Freemen") and
Ὁμόνοιαν ("the Union") would have been entirely intelligible to any Greek speaker, even if they may not have been able to grasp why the things referred to had these particular names. So his claim that Josephus did this "nowhere" is flatly and demonstrably wrong.
So he tried again:
The claim was that he didn't use meaningless ones, not that he doesn't use any.
Yes, and that claim has been shown to be wrong. There is nothing "meaningless" about
Χριστοῦ - it means "the Anointed". It is as meaningful as
Ἐξοχῆς and
ἐλευθέρων and
Ὁμόνοιαν to any Greek speaker. They may not have understood why these places and people were called these particular things (and Josephus doesn't explain in any of these cases), but the words themselves were entirely explicable.
Skipping the place names as irrelevant ...
*COUGH* Excuse me? Why are they "irrelevant"? You said that "nowhere" does he translate a foreign name into Greek and do so without explaining the names' significance. I gave you three examples where he does precisely that. No wonder you want to do a bit of "skipping".
... as it's not like he had any other names for those to give ...
That doesn't make them "irrelevant", however much you want to go "skipping" away from your erroneous claim.
you're left with stuff like "the free men" which actually he even tells you what those are. Only here is a "Jesus called blah-blah" where there is no obvious reason to use the term, nor does he hint anywhere else at what it means, or what did a Jesus do to earn it.
We can perhaps
guess why "the Freemen" were called that, but he doesn't tell us at all. Nor does he "tell" is why the place in Galilee is called "the Union" or the one in Judea is called "the Eminence". He just says they were "called" (
λεγομένου) these things because that is what they were called. Same with Jesus being "called" (
λεγομένου)the Anointed One. Go "skipping" all you like - you were plain, flat out wrong.
But that's hardly surprising since you don't have a detailed grasp of the evidence and are trying to cram the few bits you do know (or the ones that more educated people are forcing you to confront) into your
a priori, ideologically-driven conclusion. And that always ends in a muddle.
It works better the other way around Hans - detailed analysis of the source material and scholarship first,
THEN you come to a conclusion. You're doing it the way the kooks do it, with the inevitable woeful.
Yet even when he tries to actually say what messianic pretense things someone did, or set someone up as the messiah, he never uses that word.
Not in the
textus receptus, no. Has it occurred to you what all those Christian scribes might have done if they came across Josephus saying some
other guys were
λεγομένου Χριστοῦ? It's funny how Mythers will invoke Christian editing whenever it suits them, but forget all about it when it doesn't.
But even if the
textus receptus of Josephus is as he wrote it, all we can say here is that only Jesus was
λεγομένου Χριστοῦ so he's the only person he refers to in this way.
Other than the religious historicity apologists, almost nobody uses the Testimonium Flavianum as anything but an interpolation. And I just discussed above what the problems with that are.
Complete and utter garbage Hans. We have a whole host of Jewish Josephus scholars and other Jews who form the core of the scholarship on the question and who accept partial authenticity of the TF. I bet Jewish scholars like Louis Feldman, Geza Vermes and Zvi Baras would be highly amused to hear some random internet person just dismissed their scholarly consensus because they are "religious historicity apologists". The current consensus of the majority of scholars from all backgrounds is for partial authenticity of the TF. Sorry if that sticks in your craw but, yet again, the scholars are on the side of historicity and smearing them as "apologists" in the mealy-mouthed passive aggressive style of several posters here is simply pathetic.
All the more reason to think that at least some of their followers even by chance alone would think they're the messiah, yet Josephus never uses that word for them.
We have no idea whether they were considered Messiahs or not. Current scholarship (sorry, I know you hate scholarship) on the subject of intertestamental Jewish Messianic expectation is that the old idea that expectation of a Messiah was widespread and coherent in this period doesn't have much foundation. Jewish scholars in particular (those guys again!) note that references to any kind of Messianic expectation in the literature of the time are actually very few and the idea that all or even most Jews had such expectations has been an assumption thanks to a warping prism of Christianity.
Most of the people that are sometimes assumed to have been Messianic claimants actually fit far better into earlier and broader prophetic tropes. So you're allowing some very Christian-based assumptions to make you overstate how much Josephus downplays Messianism in the period.
That said, yes, you also claimed that Josephus wouldn't do what was common practice in Greek, and... what he does right in the same and next paragraph anyway. You know, since you accused US of not reading that.
E.g., he doesn't repeat "Ananus son of Ananus", but in the same paragraph he says just "when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity" or, "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", or in the next paragraph, "as for the high priest, Ananias (25) he increased in glory every day". The idea that Josephus would only identify a person in the same construct every single time, e.g., that "Jesus son of Damneus" would ONLY be talked about as "Jesus son of Damneus" to avoid confusion, even when there's no other Jesus until 3 paragraphs later, is patently false. Josephus, or any other author, never had that kind of consistence.
Oh Jesus! Look Hans, if you're going to try to respond to my posts you'd be well advised to actually read them properly, rather than blurt the first contrarian thing that pops into your head after some hurried skimming.
Try to focus. Here is what I actually said when explaining how Josephus introduces, refers to and then re-introduces various people with common names. Read carefully this time, from Post 479:
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.
Note I
didn't say he
only uses "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" and that I specifically said that at other points he calls him simply "Alexander". But my point was that the first time he refers to him he uses the referent "the son of Aristobulus" and then he uses it again the
first time in any given chapter he refers to him
OR when he needs to differentiate him from other people called "Alexander" in the same passage. He also only ever uses the one referent about him - "the son of Aristobulus" - and no others. He's either "Alexander, the son of Aristobulus" or (when there is no potential confusion about which "Alexander" is being referred to) simply "Alexander". Nothing else. Because to use some other referent about him would simply make it confusing as to which "Alexander" he's now referring to.
We find this pattern throughout Josephus' works. For "Jesus, who was called Anointed" to also be "Jesus, son of Damenus", Josephus would need to be doing something does
NOWHERE in any of his works. That's why that stupid argument doesn't fly for anyone other than desperate, source-ignorant Mythers. It's garbage.
Of course, if you can produce some examples where he doesn't carefully distinguish between people with the same name in this way and where he calls someone by one referent (name + cognomen/patronymic/gentilic) and then just lines later uses another one, now would be the time to astound the scholarly world and produce it.
You can't, because it doesn't exist. Your nonsense argument fails.
Now then, in the post you were replying to I also asked you a very simple question, which you dodged:
Are you trying to argue (the word Χριστοῦ in this passage is) a later interpolation?
You didn't answer. But later posts seem to indicate that this is precisely what you are trying to claim. The problem here is that this part of
Antiquities XX.9.1 is quoted
verbatim,
with the word
Χριστοῦ in place, by Origen in the mid-Third Century: ie about 1000 years before Christians were in any position to be tinkering with the text of Josephus. And he does this not once, not twice but
three times: in in
Contra Celsum I.4, in
Contra Celsum II:13 and in
Commentarii in evangelium Matthaei X.17. Each time he uses precisely the phrase we find in Josephus:
αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου ("the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah"). This is one of the reasons scholars consider this passage in Josephus to be original and reject the idea that it was added to or tampered with the way
Antiquities XVII.3.4 obviously was.
Of course, the Mythers have an answer to this (they always do) but, as usual, it's feeble. You summarise a version of it in Post 519 above:
@Greedyguts:
Now I don't know what Painter's argument is, but let's do the full quote thing from Origen:
And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the “Antiquities of the Jews” in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ.
What he says isn't just that Josephus said that the righteousness of "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" was so great, but that Flavius Josephus blames even the razing of the temple in the First Jewish Revolt on what the Jews did to James.
Needless to say, the only paragraph in Josephus about "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" that we have doesn't say that
So the Myther dodge is that because both in this passage (that's
Commentarii in evangelium Matthaei X.17) and in the other two where he uses the exact phrase we find in XX.9.1, Origen claims Josephus says things we don't find said in Josephus, he must have been referring to some other text or to some interpolated form of
Antiquities XX.9.1. Problem solved.
Except, it isn't.
Anyone who has actually read Origen fully and studied the scholarship on how he uses references to material like Josephus (that rules out pretty much every Myther on the planet) knows that when Origen tells us one of his sources "says" or "reports" something, he's not using his source like a modern historian, or even an ancient one. Origen was a Christian exegete and he used all of his sources with the intention of explicating the truth of the Scriptures and the (for him) unquestionable veracity of the Christian message. So Origen regularly tells us of his sources "saying" or "reporting" things that they don't actually say or report - he imposes his interpretation via his Christian conviction on them.
For example, looking at another reference to Josephus by Origen, in
Fragmenta in Lamentationes, Nr. 109, Lam 4,14 he refers to
Jewish War VI.5.3 but changes details of what Josephus reports to make them fit his exegesis on
Lamentations. Or in
Fragmenta in Lamentationes, Nr. 115, Lam 4,19 he claims:
"Josephus reports that even the mountains did not save those who were trying to escape."
But Josephus actually "reports" no such thing. Origen is reading that into what Josephus actually says and then telling us that he "reports" it when he doesn't - this is purely Origen's interpretation.
So if we turn to what Origen similarly says about what Josephus "says" or "reports" about the death of James, we are reading his interpretation: one biased by his idea that all history since Jesus has revolved around him and his followers.
The idea that the execution of James triggered a sequence of events that led to the destruction of the Temple seems to be an old one and certainly seems to predate Origen's comments on
Antiquities XX.9.1. Hegesippus ends his account of the execution of James by saying:
And so he suffered martyrdom; and they buried him on the spot, and the pillar erected to his memory still remains, close by the temple. This man was a true witness to both Jews and Greeks that Jesus is the Christ. And shortly after Vespasian besieged Judaea, taking them captive.(H.E. II.23.18)
The idea that the fall of Jerusalem was connected to and caused by the execution of James became a standard trope, being mentioned also by Eusebius (though following Origen) and Jerome and implied in Gnostic traditions about James.
And reading the rest of
Antiquities XX (ie chapters 9 and 11), it is easy to see why an exegete like Origen would read Josephus this way. Because Josephus details how Ananus' fall from his former position encouraged him to wield influence through bribery and currying favour with gifts thanks to wealth he gained from extortionate religious taxes (XX.9.2). This led to the
sicarii rebels (the villains of Josephus' account of the Jewish War) targeting him via the kidnapping of his son, Eleazar, forcing Ananus to lean on Albinus to release captured
sicarii in exchange for his son (XX.9.3). This was followed by Albinus trying to gain favour with the increasingly fractious priests by releasing even more
sicarii rebels so that "the prisons were indeed emptied, but the country was filled with rebel bandits" (XX.9.5).
He presents this sequence of events as the precursors of the procuratorship of Gessius Florus and as the background to the environment of political dispute, rebel banditry and Roman violence and oppression which triggered the rebellion that he had already detailed in his earlier work, the
Jewish War.
Naturally
we can see that Josephus isn't saying these things happened because of the execution of James and isn't connecting James to them in anything but an incidental way. But
Origen didn't read his sources that way - he read them through the lenses of faith and "saw" connections and causes in this sequence of events where Josephus details how " as for the affairs of the Jews, they grew worse and worse continually" and how this sequence led to the fall of Jerusalem. Like Hegesippus, and others, the place of the execution of James in this sequence was not
hoc post hoc but rather
hoc propter hoc.
This explains why Origen tells his readers that Josephus "says" things and "reports" things that we can see are not explicit in Josephus at all. And it does so without resorting to suppositions about a hypothetical redaction of Josephus that does explicitly "say" these things but which is found nowhere in the textual tradition.
Because that supposition is highly problematic. As I've already noted, the idea that James' execution brought the punishment of the destruction of the Temple down on the priesthood was already a trope in the Christian tradition. If there had been a redaction of Josephus which claimed this explicitly it makes no sense that it would be cited by Origen in these three passages and then disappear altogether - other Christian writers would have used it and it would have been likely to have been preserved. After all, the fact that the TF is not quoted or referred to in its current form until Eusebius is, correctly, used to indicate that it did not exist in its current (interpolated) form prior to the Fourth Century. The same argument works here.
Yet we see no sign of this hypothetical redaction and there is no reference to it anywhere else. This doesn't make sense. That Origen was doing his usual creative reading of his sources when he refers to what Josephus "says" fits the evidence better.
Which leaves us with "
Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ" being quoted in the mid Third Century and clear evidence that this IS how Josephus described Jesus in his account of the execution of James.
However you cut it, the Myther attempts to wriggle away from the implications of
Antiquities XX.9.1 all totally
fail:
- The claim Χριστοῦ would have been "unintelligible" fails - it was understood by Greek speakers to mean "Anointed".
- The claim this nickname would have been explained to his readers fails - Josephus often referred to such names without explaining them.
- The claim that "Jesus, who was called Anointed" is the same person as "Jesus, the son of Damenus" fails on multiple counts, particularly because it is the absolute opposite of the careful way Josephus refers to and differentiates between people with the same name.
- The claim that either the phrase "who was called Anointed" or just the word "Anointed" are interpolations fails - the verbatim quotes in three places in Origen's works show that it is original.
So even if we don't go down the rabbit hole of debate about the TF, this reference to Jesus on its own kills Mytherism dead. One reference by Josephus is enough to establish the existence of several other such First Century preachers, prophets and miracle workers so it's enough for Jesus as well. At least for any objective person without an ideological bias and a big emotional anti-Christian axe to grind. Anyone who doesn't accept a clear identification of a contemporary of Josephus via a reference to his historical brother in the context of events that Josephus himself witnessed as a young man is simply not wanting to be convinced.
I just took about half of a day off work responding to two posts. I've been here before and I know that responding with a sufficient level of detail to refute the glib but unscholarly little squibs used as arguments by the Mythers is both vastly time consuming and ultimately futile - they just
don't want to know. You can't argue rationally with a burning ideologically driven emotional need.
So if anyone wants to get in touch or run a Myther argument by me that they think is actually convincing and that I haven't countered already, feel free to drop me a PM. Otherwise, I have much better things to do with my time than beat my head up against ill-informed Dunning-Krugerism.
I've posted a fairly detailed summary of the Jesus Myth thesis and its flaws and why historians reject it
HERE for anyone who is interested. Yes, it's a summary and yes, I'm well aware of the Myther counter arguments and the responses to them and the counters to the counters and so on
ad infinitum. I'd simply suggest some careful, detailed study of the scholarship rather than accepting what sounds appealing by some amateur bloggers and online bluffers. Those scholars aren't idiots and, unlike the Mythers, they don't all come from one ideological position (which should always ring a true sceptic's alarm bells).
Goodbye.
(Cue prancing and gloating repsonses from the usual suspects in 3, 2, 1 ...)
.
