Exactly. You have to account for BOTH citations together before cavalierly dismissing either. Occam's Razor anyone?
Stone
What counts as a historical Jesus?
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Exactly. You have to account for BOTH citations together before cavalierly dismissing either. Occam's Razor anyone?
Stone
Belz...
Fiend God
Yeah but herein lies the problem: the gospels were written late, and their writers probably had access to Paul, so it's not really corroboration so much as using an interpretation of the already-vague word "brother" to assign Jesus a real brother, whether that's true or not.
People have been using family relation words metaphorically for thousands of years.
WTF? This has NOTHING to do with my point at all. So one can Google and find out. Big deal.
That has nothing to do with my point: Obviously, plenty of people have referred to Reagan as the Gipper WITHOUT KNOWING WHY HE'S CALLED THAT AND NOT EVEN BOTHERING TO INQUIRE. Its derivation has DIDDLY-SQUAT to do with the fact that many don't even care. Where it comes from is totally beside the point. So you now know where it comes from -- WHOOP-DE-DO. Many don't/didn't and still call/called him that. THAT'S the real point. Duh.
Stone
No devout Christian is going to bother to proactively assign Jesus any sibling at all once his mother has birthed Jesus through Immacculate Quickie. The notion of Jesus's having any sibling at all has to come from a time _before_ this sort of hagiography, not after.
Stone
Not true though.
The truth is - we only know what religious Christian copyists wrote many centuries after Paul and Jesus had supposedly died.
We have no idea what Paul ever wrote about anyone called “James, the Lords brother”.
However, in contrast, what we do know as quite definite fact, is that the letters of Paul and the gospels are filled with obvious untruths and fictions, and are in that respect completely unreliable, and especially so in the total absence of any independent corroborated contemporary evidence.
Yes. Belief in Jesus having brothers is most likely to be early, on that account.
Then don't use Paul as a source of any information whatsoever.
eight bits
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IanS
OK, thank you. Wells read what is now a 50 year-old report from a pathologist who did not examine the body he is describing. So, when we read scare-quotes around "impossible," ...
The passage being questionned is from the Gospel of John (whether the epistle is written by the same author is disputed). It says only that water and blood came out (exelthen) immediately (euthys). There's no characterization of the quality of flow, oozy, gushy, ... There's no discussion of whether there was separation of blood and water, as opposed to what might appear to be diluted blood - no details at all except that there was a spear-piercing and something wet and bloody came out without delay.
The evangelist's point in mentioning the witness appears to be that there should no question that the hero was dead at that point. Throughout the Gospels, it falls to Roman military expertise to assure the reader of this plot point. John's innovation is to provide methodological detail, displaying our experts being good sceptics and actively testing their hypothesis. This was not a "scratch test," but a real stabbing. Dude is dead, barring a miracle in its own right.
I am also unsure what the discussion of baptism is supposed to add to this. It is uncontroversial that John the Baptist practiced some version of the ritual independently of Jesus, and that Paul had practiced ritual baptism before there were any Gospels. John's watery detail, then, appears to come too late to have any influence on the usage or interpretation of the ritual. The combination of "water" (amniotic fluid) and blood is typical of childbirth. However, as can hardly be surprising in a ritual that was popular with Jews, there never was any blood in baptism - whatever the "born again" rhetoric may have been surrounding it.
Eucharistic wine is typically watered wine, and that ritual detail may resonate here. However, watered is how wine was typically drunk at the time - unwatered wine being the "strong drink" of the disreputable. Since Paul attests to the ritual being observed, it seems likely that people were toasting Jesus with watered wine long before John was available to them.
In any case, the witness is not impeached because he characterized some gore as runny.
OK, thank you. Wells read what is now a 50 year-old report from a pathologist who did not examine the body he is describing. So, when we read scare-quotes around "impossible," ...
... we can be confident that the quotation marks are well justified. And, "modern medicine" didn't agree with this pathologist, Wells did.
The passage being questionned is from the Gospel of John (whether the epistle is written by the same author is disputed). It says only that water and blood came out (exelthen) immediately (euthys). There's no characterization of the quality of flow, oozy, gushy, ... There's no discussion of whether there was separation of blood and water, as opposed to what might appear to be diluted blood - no details at all except that there was a spear-piercing and something wet and bloody came out without delay.
The evangelist's point in mentioning the witness appears to be that there should no question that the hero was dead at that point. Throughout the Gospels, it falls to Roman military expertise to assure the reader of this plot point. John's innovation is to provide methodological detail, displaying our experts being good sceptics and actively testing their hypothesis. This was not a "scratch test," but a real stabbing. Dude is dead, barring a miracle in its own right.
I am also unsure what the discussion of baptism is supposed to add to this. It is uncontroversial that John the Baptist practiced some version of the ritual independently of Jesus, and that Paul had practiced ritual baptism before there were any Gospels. John's watery detail, then, appears to come too late to have any influence on the usage or interpretation of the ritual. The combination of "water" (amniotic fluid) and blood is typical of childbirth. However, as can hardly be surprising in a ritual that was popular with Jews, there never was any blood in baptism - whatever the "born again" rhetoric may have been surrounding it.
Eucharistic wine is typically watered wine, and that ritual detail may resonate here. However, watered is how wine was typically drunk at the time - unwatered wine being the "strong drink" of the disreputable. Since Paul attests to the ritual being observed, it seems likely that people were toasting Jesus with watered wine long before John was available to them.
In any case, the witness is not impeached because he characterized some gore as runny.
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^
Possibly, but style can be imitated
Anyway, the thread itself is the interesting thing, particularly this post
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christianity/historical-jesus-t219-19400.html#p1129116
Tanya does not address how come the Agapios is so markedly shorter and more noncommittal, nor does she address what we already know from other sources about both Josephus's own bio and the Origen cite of ANTIQUITIES. All of this places ANTIQUITIES at or earlier than the turn of the 1st/2nd centuries. Nor is she honest about the earliest mss. of ANTIQUITIES. They DO post-date the Agapios cite. Fact, the Agapios cite predates any of our extant ANTIQUITIES mss. by roughly a century or more.
We're losing the forest for the trees here. It's time to pony up: Show us any other counter-cultural agitator of Jesus's own day who is any better documented than Jesus. Fact, the Jesus documentation is sparse. Fact, documentation for all such marginal agitators is sparse. Show us anything different.
Doesn't anyone here find this blatant double standard being applied to different ancient historical agitators of the same period deeply offensive and reckless?
Stone
This logic (such as it is) can be applied to many things (at which point it promptly blows up
)No devout Christian is going to bother to proactively say that Jesus was crucified under Claudius Caesar or was over 50 years old when he was crucified even though i makes no historical...oh wait a minute we DO have such a devout Christian doing such a thing: Irenaeus
Ok well we can say that no devout Christian is going to bother to proactively say that Jesus was born under Alexander Jannaeus based on some non historical philosophical...oh wait a minute we DO have such a devout Christian doing such a thing: Epiphanius.
Oh I got it there is no way devout Christian is going to bother to proactively say that Philo met Peter in Rome because Philo didn't mention Jesus at...oh wait a minute DO have such a devout Christian doing such a thing: Eusebius in his The History of the Church
Let's face it there were times devout Christians were like the Looking Glass' White Queen and believed six impossible things before breakfast.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Have you actually read Pines, Stone? (You quote his translation slightly wrong, by the way). [EDIT: I see what you (or whoever you're copying that from) did...you aren't quoting his main rendering of the text from pages 8-10, but the abbreviated comparison rendering from page 16.]
Agapios also wrote nearly a thousand years after Josephus did, using translated Syriac sources.
And the extant manuscripts of the Kitab al-'Unwan postdate the earliest extant manuscripts of the Antiquities.
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Belz...
Fiend God
Of course. And the "eternal virgin" doctrine is laughable for several reasons.
But what I meant was that the fact that the later Gospels mention James as Jesus' biological brother doesn't really help us interpret Paul's mention of James as Brother of the Lord because for all we know they did the same thing you did : assumed Paul meant brother brother, and then included him in their stories, like they did Peter.
Belz...
Fiend God
I think that was the whole point. We can't.
Simon of Peraea and Athronges both of whom are in Josephus.
In fact, even in the brief story Simon of Peraea Josephus gives more details as to what he did then we have regarding Jesus in the badly tampered Testimonium Flavianum: "He burnt down the royal palace at Jericho, and plundered what was left in it. He also set fire to many other of the king's houses in several places of the country, utterly destroyed them, and permitted those that were with him to take what was left in them for a prey."
Before you bring them up Paul and the Gospels don't count because the first is vision information and gives no meaningful details and the second because every time it comes to known history or social political events it fails miserably.
If we are to include such late works then Apollonius of Tyana also comes to mind. Letters by him as well as works written soon after his death were used to create The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. As pointed out by Richard Carrier even Eusebius did not question the existence of Apollonius of Tyana but in his The Treatise of Eusebius Against the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus he passes off the miracles as trickery or demons...I guess that the same could have applied to Jesus never occurred to him.
It is telling that Mark (regarded as the oldest of the gospels) names four brothers of Jesus and mentions he had sisters as well. Makes you wonder why they even tried the whole "eternal virgin" doctrine in the first place.
Also supposedly Marcion's "Luke" (which he said was written by Paul) had no birth story which if as some theorize it was added to form the Luke we know would put the whole virgin story late--between 140 and 180 CE.
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I'm talking about the Agapios CITE, not the Agapios mss. What you point out is certainly relevant -- and Thank you. But the ms. history of the Agapios cite starts much closer to the time it was written, and its transmissional history is not as suspect nor as long as that for the ANTIQS., with fewer "foreign agents" involved, so to speak. In addition, while the Agapios cite may be _nearly_ a thousand years later, the earliest ANTIQS. ms. is _over_ a thousand years later.
Furthermore, no one seems ready to address this glaring coincidence:
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christianity/historical-jesus-t219-19360.html#p1126029
If all that is just coincidence, instead of a clear indication that modern scholars do know what they're doing and have correctly smoked out what isn't from Josephus, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Stone
I think you are no longer making any constructive case in the above, and you are not referencing anything to support your belief that we should accept at face value anonymous eye-witness claims reported by an anonymous author of g-John, known only from an even more anonymous chain of Christian copying, apparently produced centuries after the claimed crucifixion.
However, as far as Well's comments are concerned - note that his book was published in 1996. So it's a reasonable assumption that he was checking the accuracy of what he wrote around that date (his book is not from 1963). But if you disagree with what Well's writes there about the medical evidence, then by all means quote any medical report that contradicts Wells on the possibility of an unknown witness, viewing from an unknown distance/position, being able to see water mixed into blood coming from a spear wound in the side of a dead man ....
... but while you at it, maybe you can clear up the other problem here, which is the issue of the date of these copies that you are relying on for any such passage saying a witness saw any water and blood. What date do you have for the writing of that earliest copy? Is that eye-witness reported in fragments dated anywhere near to the time of the execution? Or is it only known in Christian copies written centuries after the execution?
And of course, it's equally telling that Mark, with its siblings stuff, has not a whisper about any of the "eternal virgin" stuff. This is yet more evidence that the ascription of siblings for Jesus comes in _early_, not late.
Stone
Don't use Josephus as a source of information either.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Nearly the same amount of time separates Agapios' manuscript from Josephus' original as separates the earliest Antiquities manuscript from Josephus' original, so why do you think Agapios' version is "closer" to the original or passed through fewer "foreign agents" by the time it was transmitted to him? Especially since the extant manuscripts of Antiquities are still in the same language as Josephus' original (Greek), while the version Agapios cites from was translated at least twice (from Greek to Syriac, and then to Arabic)?
That's not a "coincidence" - Agapios' version isn't merely the Greek version without those phrases, but also contains several entirely rewritten bits. In addition, as Pines notes, the manuscript of Kitab al-'Unwan used is incomplete, but was extensively quoted in the al-Majmu`al-Mubarak of Girgis Al-Makin (a 13th Century Christian Coptic historian) - Pines uses the 14th Century manuscript of Al-Makin's work kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais to "fill in the holes" that are missing from the direct Agapios' manuscript. And it turns out that there are some differences between the Agapios text and the Al-Makin quote of the Agapios text of the same purported Josephus extract of the Testimonium.
And Pines finds the suggestion put forth by David Flusser that Agapios' recension of the Testimonium originally had as its last sentence "And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still up to now, not disappeared" to be "very probable", you know.
Lastly, I take back what I said about which of Pines' translations that you're quoting. While it appears to be the "more literal" translation he provides on page 16, your quote is missing the "three days" after "they reported that he had appeared to them" for some reason (Pines includes that in all translations of the passage in Agapios).
You appear to be cutting and pasting it from here, which likewise drops that part of Pines' translation.
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