I don't believe in the authenticity of the TF at all. But I think the works of Josephus in general are real first century products. My argument of course is that we can't use only the date of the earliest extant manuscript to determine times of composition of texts. Otherwise we end up like Hardouin. And he was a "lone nut" as regards this forgery theory of ancient writings.
Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus
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Wait a minute!! Forgery within forgery.
You better wait a little longer.
You must not stop until you get to the end.
You must help uncover the large scale forgery and manipulation of so-called Church writings.
You must help uncover the bogus History of the Church.
I am extremely delighted that you have shown that the earliest extant copy of Church History is from around the 10-11th century because that will explain why Apologetic writings after the 4th century do not agree with Church History.
If in the 4th century Eusebius wrote that Clement was established in the Church as the 3rd bishop of Rome c 95 CE why in the 5th century did Augustine of Hippo, Rufinus and the Chronograph of 354, AFTER Church History, admit Clement was the second Bishop of Rome c 68-69 CE--Not 95 CE?
There was massive fraud and manipulation of Apologetic writings in antiquity and the fraud was carried far later than the 4th century.
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You mean this sort of stuff below? --
Well, your above post as #4677 is more very obvious misrepresented utter nonsense from you yet again, isn’t it! Why should I keep explaining it to you in post after post when you deliberately keep misrepresenting things in every reply you make here?
Look - you are talking now about Acts (which is not a source we were actually talking about anyway) and saying that whoever wrote Acts had said that Paul met Barnabus and others. Well … so what? That is in no way a statement from Paul saying that he learned what he knew about Jesus from Barnabus or from James or from anyone else at all, is it! No, it most certainly is not!
You are constantly throughout all these threads, and especially in this discussion, simply assuming that people must have known Jesus … such that you simply assume that Barnabus or James or others must have surely have told Paul all about Jesus. But that assumption by you is 100% totally unwarranted. There is zero credible evidence of anyone ever knowing Jesus, let alone any credible evidence of any of them telling Paul all about their escapades with Jesus. Indeed, to the absolute contrary, as you very well know, Paul explicitly insists that no human gave him his knowledge of Jesus.
You must quote where Paul claims he obtained his Jesus belief from what others had told him about their meetings with Jesus. Where is that quote please??
You absolutely must quote credible claims from James, Barnabus or any of the others saying that had met Jesus and told Paul all about him. Where is that quote please??
I asked you to comment on my point that a tenth century earliest manuscript doesn't mean that the work inscribed on it was composed in the tenth century. Can you do this?
You don't believe the ONLY non-apologetic source to mention Jesus the Christ which was supposedly written at the end of the 1st century.
Your HJ argument is now officially dead.
Now, You have NOTHING but your imagine.
If you continue with the established dead end argument for HJ you may end up looking "nutty".
So you can't comment on my point that a tenth century earliest manuscript doesn't mean that the work inscribed on it was composed in the tenth century. Pity.
You are evidently intrepid enough to run that risk. I can do no less than follow your example.
Craig - you really will have to start accepting some inescapable truths and facts here. Otherwise most of us are going to stop taking your posts seriously at all.
Look;- you must very well know and understand that when all we have as copies of what Josephus or Tacitus and others were supposed to have written around the first few centuries AD, are Christian copies written 1000 years later, that immediately puts a huge question mark over the accuracy and reliability of what appears in the 11th century and later copies.
You are talking as if it were being suggested here that the whole of what Josephus had originally written, had been changed entirely. But that is absolutely NOT what sceptics are suggesting at all.
What is being suggested is that because authors like Josephus and Tacitus only made the briefest of passing mention of Jesus, and because even bible scholars and theologians all agree that almost all of the early Christian and non-Christian writing of this sort appears to have suffered from all sorts of alterations over the years, it is perfectly obvious and really unarguable that brief passages such as these may very easily have had words added or deleted in accordance with what Christian copyists of the 11th century had by then come to believe.
It really does not take much at all to completely transform the apparent meaning of such brief passages as those.
For example, in the case of the very famous passage in Paul’s letter where he talks about James as "the lords brother" (and I know that is not from Josephus!), it's perfectly obvious that the sentence could very easily have originally just said ... "other apostles saw I none" full stop! ... and then a later scribe thinking that he would have also met James if he was at the church in Jerusalem simply added ... "save James" ... and then finally, yet another scribe, thinking that James was supposed to be the brother of Jesus, simply decided to clarify who James was by adding ... "the Lord's brother" ...
... the point of that is not that I am saying that is how it happened. What I am saying is that a very small change like that, just adding those final three explanatory words "the lords brother", has created what is now in 2014 commonly claimed as the very best and most definitive evidence of Jesus ... in fact, it's even something you yourself have just been trying to claim as proof that Paul would have been told all about Jesus because he met his brother! But ...
... those words "the lords brother" come at the end of a sentence which in any case would have ended quite naturally just at the point where it says "other apostles saw I none", that is a natural end to the sentence. The next words "save James" are in the form of an afterthought ... and the final three words are in the form of adding an explanation of who James was thought to be ...
... but all of that comes not from anything that we know ever to have been written by Paul c.55AD. It comes instead from those same Christian copyists who even bible scholars and theologians now admit, were often altering these documents in small ways like that, to add any explanatory notes, or make any small additions and deletions wherever they had come to think that it needed changing.
So you do have to be very careful about accepting any brief sentences like that at face value when you are relying only upon later Christian religious copying, as you are in the case of Josephus, Tacitus and the rest, and of course also for the gospels and letters etc.
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Craig B
Looks like you're a little busy now, but
I wouldn't confidently extrapolate that "rising sawtooth" trajectory
? -->
........Christ-maybe (lookin' good after death) + God-no -->
..........................................Christ-yes + God-son -->
.......................... Christ-yes + God-son-maybe -->
................................................................Christ-yes + God-yes
back to a historical Jesus that was uniformly more modest than Mark's portrayal.
I could see the first element of that series having being "Christ-maybe + God-(son)-maybe." I take that to be within the range of a brief, conclusory description imputed to a hypothetical Jewish rhetorician, as supposedly imagined by a pagan Celsus, and reported to us only through Christian Origen.
Looks like you're a little busy now, but
Mark, agreed. For Matthew, Jesus is what dejudge says (except for our colleague's Matthew-esque false etymology that the Holy Ghost is a ghost), the son of a virgin and the Holy Spirit. Luke equivocates, God definitely takes an interest in Jesus' birth, maybe contributes some DNA (although Mohammed can read the Annunciation without disagreement), but definitely, Jesus is the Messiah. Leaving the synoptics, John is over the top.
I wouldn't confidently extrapolate that "rising sawtooth" trajectory
? -->
........Christ-maybe (lookin' good after death) + God-no -->
..........................................Christ-yes + God-son -->
.......................... Christ-yes + God-son-maybe -->
................................................................Christ-yes + God-yes
back to a historical Jesus that was uniformly more modest than Mark's portrayal.
I could see the first element of that series having being "Christ-maybe + God-(son)-maybe." I take that to be within the range of a brief, conclusory description imputed to a hypothetical Jewish rhetorician, as supposedly imagined by a pagan Celsus, and reported to us only through Christian Origen.
I am commenting on your dead HJ argument.
Let us not get diverted from your admission that you do not believe the ONLY non-apologetic source to mention Jesus the Christ.
You have inadvertently supported my argument that HJ is a HOAX.
The "TF" is a well established forgery.
HJ is a HOAX.
What nonsense. I have shown you reports of contacts between Jesus people and Paul. You now demand that we find a signed letter from James or Barnabas saying "I told Paul x and y things, that I personally learned from Jesus just after he had performed miracle a and before he performed miracle b." Well, evidence like that would be fine and dandy, particularly if we had holographs signed in Peter the Apostle's own blood.
Alas, the vagaries of preservation are not usually so kind.
Given how popular New Chronology in its many forms is I don't know about the lone part.
Though if you want the mammoth Christian Forge factory in all it glory 
D) IMHO nothing beats Joseph Wheless' 1930 Forgery In Christianity in let's take some interesting points and bury them in a bunch of conspiratorial insanity.Wheless overstates the case I think.Given how popular New Chronology in its many forms is I don't know about the lone part.
Right, so no evidence of any kind then to support any of your claims?
No quotes from a single soul saying they met Jesus and told Paul all about it?
And no quotes from Paul saying he got his Jesus beliefs from any human person?
Nothing at all.
Well OK, so everyone can clearly see what a complete train wreck your Jesus position has now become. Where for some reason you feel compelled to defend the utterly indefensible by insisting that all sorts of people must have met Jesus and told Paul about it all. Even though you cannot find a single word of any such thing anywhere in the entire bible, but are quite happy to run purely on blind faith instead.
That is quite fantastic. Barnabas and a bunch of "prophets" go from Jerusalem, round up Paul in Tarsus, and they all spend a year preaching and converting in Antioch, and you consider it a matter of irrational faith that one might conclude that Paul had human sources of information about Jesus! I simply have no way of arguing with that.
You are assuming that any of those people had personal knowledge of Jesus which thy could give to Paul. But how on earth did you decide that?
There is zero evidence that any of those people ever wrote to say they had met Jesus. Let alone any evidence that Paul ever said any of them ever described any such thing to him.
If you keep making these claims then you really must support it with evidence of what you say -
On what basis did you ever decide that any of those people met Jesus and could tell Paul about it?
Please produce the evidence to show where any of these people met Jesus.
That's right. We have evidence that Paul met and communicated with such people for protracted periods, and that they were companions of Jesus; but we have no letter from any of them addressed to Paul, describing their meetings with Jesus; and we have no letter from Paul acknowledging receipt of such information from them.
Woe is me!
I agree. While it is true that our latest copies are ridiculously recent we must remember that the monasteries that did the copying were very isolated from one another with their only contact between each other being the monk who took the 'book of the dead around and writing who died since his last visit and that was likely ten years' (Burke The Day The Universe Changed "Matter of Fact") So communication on a large scale was next to nonexistent.
Then comes the issue of how monasteries filed their books...or rather how they didn't.. As Burke states there wasn't enough knowledge in any one monastery to separate the works into separate subjects or categories. As the result the "library" look more like the floor of some stereotypical bachelor pad then what we considered a library. "Medieval higgledy-piggledy" is the way Burke described it.
Then you have titles on page edges or on the first page of the book. And then the title might not tell you that much. The example Burke gives, Sermones Bonventurae (Sermons of St Bonaventure) shows just what kind of mess things were. This book could be
Sermons composed by St Bonaventure of Fidenza
Sermons composed by somebody called Bonaventure
Sermons copied by a Bonaventure
Sermons copied by somebody belonging to church of St. Bonaventure
Sermons preached by a Bonaventure
Sermons once owned by a Bonaventure
Sermons once owned by church of St. Bonaventure
Sermons by various people of whom the first or most important was by somebody called Bonaventure--the rest of the book? No clue.
With this kind of filing system you didn't need to actively destroy anything...because you may not even know you have it in the first place. In fact it was due to the Renaissance and interest in the Classical world that many copies of Greek and Roman works that monasteries didn't even know they had were as Burke put it "saved from the mildew and the rats".
If the lack of a filing system make knowing what monasteries had what works next to impossible then there logically could not have been any kind of systemic "forging" between monasteries.
While it is true forgery was epidemic during much of the medieval period (1 in 3 was a forgery) you are dealing with communities there were isolated from each other to the point that a distance of just 50 miles could make the spoken language all but unintelligible. So the majority of these forgeries were local affairs rather then the continent spanning network needed to pull off the kind of consistency we see between copies of third party documents relating to Jesus.
The common sources must be far earlier and logic would point to before the Western Roman Empire went down the tubes in 476 CE.
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The key point, however, is that Paul never wrote that he lacked natural sources of information about Jesus' mortal life in the first place.
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