spin wrote:

Owdhat wrote:

dogsgod wrote:[
There is no evidence at all. None. There is no way of knowing if anything reverts back to actual events. The story could be total fiction for all we know regardless of what was written years after the time the story was set in.

There seems to be a misunderstanding of what constitutes 'evidence'. Everything that has a purported connection with the subject at hand is evidence.

This is not correct. Evidence is what can be demonstrated to be reflect some aspect the subject. Data has to be somehow converted into evidence, given a context, otherwise it remains functionally unusable information. Evidence needs hooks to be hung on. There are a number of criteria that get used for discerning if data can be considered to have weight of evidence. These include locating the data in time and place. Unprovenanced and undated texts are very hard to get evidence out of because their information cannot be hung anywhere specific. This is why there have been wars fought over the dating of P52, a tiny fragment of gJn, which is popularly dated to the early 2nd c. because of first publication of the fragment by Roberts 80 years ago, though more modern analyses with a vast range of newly available exemplars have strongly questioned the dating. Schmidt dates it to the end of the 2nd c. Nongbri argues that the ranges of dates is much wider. (Wiki on P52 has references.) Without P52 there is no meaningful way to date any gospel to within 100 years of the era they purport to describe. This (along with other issues) renders them unable to be considered significant historically.

Evidence is not just another word for information.

Owdhat wrote:The church at the end of town built in the sixties is evidence, not good evidence, but it attests that in the 20 century people were around that really believed a person called Jesus was executed in the first century and was resurrected, and the tradition was still strong enough for people to be erecting monuments to the event.

Being weak evidence does not stop it being evidence.

When some one can categorically prove that Josephus did not write anything connected with the Christian founder then & only then will his texts stop being evidence.

The transmission process of his texts by christian scribes when dealing with matters of christian interest renders the Josephus information void for evidentiary purposes. This difficulty is underlined by the fact that part of the infamous Testimonium Flavianum is considered by all scholars to be bogus. Any attempted use of an expurgated version is purely arbitrary and thus of no evidentiary value.

I cannot agree here, you may be right in a modern information rich situation, but as we recede into the past and the information becomes scant the line blurs and all information becomes evidence. You cannot walk past it without an explanation and if you have to explain it, it must be evidence of some sort.
The Tf wether bogus or not is information that some one (early on) had a reason for writing words connected with the subject and is therefore evidence.

Stein wrote:

dogsgod wrote:

Stein wrote:

IanS was calling the religious writings "evidence". Once you do that, there are non-scripturals that have the exact same ms. status. Neither of you can weasel out of that one. IanS was being provokingly misleading at best.

Stein

There's nothing to provoke. All IanS or anyone can do is explain where one draws their conclusions from, those that find that provocative is their problem.

Wrong: that's not what IanS was doing. He was stating there were only religious sources out there as if those were the facts. That's nowhere near the facts. He's been around this thread long enough to know that's nowhere near the facts and that non-scripturals have been hotly discussed throughout this humongous thread. He stated that non-scripturals are nonexistent as a deliberate way to provoke.

Stein

I think you will find what you say here is actually not true (and that's the 3rd or 4th time you've repeated that in your last few posts ... so do be careful about untrue personalised complaints like that).

What I have repeatedly said is that it appears to be the case that none of non-religious sources such as as Tacitus and Josephus etc. are reporting first-hand eyewitness accounts, but instead they are quite clearly not claiming anything more than to merely reproduce a few scant mentions of the Jesus stories that had been in circulation at the time.

Afaik, those authors are not themselves claiming that the information was certain to be fact. They are merely giving an account of what was believed at the time.

The earlier religious sources such as Paul and the earliest forms of the Gospels (now only existing as a few fragments, or even less!) appear to be in a different category, whereby the authors are preaching the claim that other people must have met a living Jesus at some past time ... although again as far as I can tell none of them are themselves claiming to be eye-witnesses to ever meeting Jesus.

As I have repeatedly explained - that is the rather obvious and entirely valid source not just of my own scepticism, but also the source of scepticism from writers like Ellergard, Wells and most if not all other such authors. That is, to spell it out again -

- it appears, that there is actually no direct first hand eyewitness evidence claimed by anyone, not even by the religious authors themselves.

- instead it seems to be the case that all of them are writing about a Jesus figure who lived some time in the past, and whom they all believe existed as the true messiah, but who none of them ever personally witnessed in any way at all (except in delusional dreams).

Now that, to me, does not appear to be reliable convincing evidence that Jesus actually existed.

To be entirely fair about it - I think it's true to say that people would not normally be so suspicious despite such apparent lack of evidence. Which is why we are not especially suspicious in some cases where there may be only scant history about some non-messianic figures such as certain ancient kings and queens .... except that in the case of Jesus we are talking about original claimants who were making religious claims of witnessing the messiah, and unfortunately it does seem that religious sources have a continuous history of inventing entirely untrue stories about mythical gods ... often gods who thousands of believers swear to have seen and which were stories widely believed 2000 years ago, but which are now know to physically impossible.

IanS wrote:

Stein wrote:

IanS wrote:Regarding the validity of Historical evidence in general -

People here who think it’s valid to say that if we do not accept the so-called “historical evidence” for Jesus (apparently the “evidence” which comes only from religious writing)

Your assumption is flawed right at the outset. It is deliberate incitement on this board to say that only religious writings form the basis of modern secular historiography on Jesus, when half the 800+-page discussion here has centered around non-religious sources, and you very, very well know that and you very,very well know that others here know you know that, which makes your remark here deliberately provoking.

Stein

Afaik, after 800+ pages, one of the few things that everyone here now accepts is that those non-religious sources (I assume people mean things like Josephus and Tacitus), few as they are and often making only scant mention of Jesus anyway, are never more than hearsay accounts produced long after the event.

A hearsay account like that does not qualify as the original source of “evidence”. Instead it is only implying that evidence came from someone else at an earlier date ... and in the case of Josephus and Tacitus etc., afaik none of them ever say where that evidence actually came from anyway!

If you were familiar with science research, you would know that secondary sources like that are not actually evidence at all - you need to produce the original primary source of the evidence. Otherwise your claims of evidence are quite simply invalid.

The Antiqs. XX presents itself as primary evidence no less than the authentic Paulines do. It is written testimony by a contemporary who lived in Jerusalem at the same time and in the same circles that were roiled by Ananus's execution of James. One can scream up and down that this is unreliable and that is unreliable. But that makes no difference to a source's physical status. As Owdhat has just said --

"I cannot agree here, you may be right in a modern information rich situation, but as we recede into the past and the information becomes scant the line blurs and all information becomes evidence. You cannot walk past it without an explanation and if you have to explain it, it must be evidence of some sort."

There is nothing that separates the status of primary pagan sources like Antiqs. XX and Paul's 1 Corinthians except your lie that only religious writings form the evidence on which to assess the historicity/non-historicity of Jesus. You know damn well that both these documents have the same status. In fact, looking at the scripturals as a whole is to be struck by the fact that non-scripturals actually give variant accounts of certain key events like the death of James. That in itself stamps Antiqs. XX as a primary source -- in fact, a better source than Acts in particular, if it comes to that, since there are some indications that Antiqs. XX may come from a possible eyewitness whereas there are no apparent indications that Acts comes from anything of the kind.

To assert primacy for a religious canon of texts that include third-person hearsay like that found in Acts over a category of texts that include an Antiqs. XX that presents itself as a possible eye-witness account is to indulge in pernicious misinformation of the most unscrupulous sort.

Owdhat is right. These all constitute evidence of one kind or another. Pretending they don't is tantamount to book-burning or Soviet-style photo-doctoring.

Stein

There is however one useful point raised above re. the nature of “evidence” re. Jesus -

- if people here who believe in a real Jesus actually think that true “evidence” is merely that which is ever spoken or written by anyone (no matter what it says or where it came from), then that may go a long way to explaining why those people believe the Jesus story.

But what they have to understand is that just because Tacitus or whoever reports the current belief that Jesus was worshiped as the messiah and was said to be crucified under Pontius Pilate etc., that is only evidence that Tacitus believed that to be the story which was in circulation at the time …

… it is only evidence that the story existed … it is most definitely NOT evidence that the story was true.

This is precisely why the subject of science eventually superseded the earlier methods of philosophical argument and particular religious philosophy. To explain - in science you cannot write a research paper in which you refer to a secondary sources as your “evidence”. If you do that then the editor will return your paper to you with a reminder that your so-called evidence is not valid at all ….

… in science you must refer to the primary source of evidence itself. You must show where the evidence truly came from (not merely where someone else later said he believed it was true).

But the very reason we do that in science is precisely because when science first began to emerge as a more accurate way of explaining things, it was realised that primary sources were the only valid source of claims about evidence.

In this present case of evidence for Jesus - the argument is not about the existence of evidence which merely shows that believers existed 2000 years ago. We know that! We know there is written evidence to confirm that people believed the Jesus story and that they were trying to establish a religion to worship Jesus as the true Messiah. That degree of evidence is not in any dispute …

…. What is in dispute is whether there is any evidence that the beliefs were actually based on a real person in the form of Jesus as described in the Gospels. And for that it appears there is actually no primary evidence at all …

…. Certainly it seems that later hearsay sources such Tacitus and Josephus are not offering or ever claiming to offer evidence that Jesus truly existed (they are only giving evidence that the stories were in circulation) …

… and that leaves us just with the religious sources themselves. Though again they do not appear to be actually giving anything more than unsubstantiated claims of their own religious beliefs. Beliefs which were entirely centred around miraculous stories which at the time were widely believed by almost everyone as perfectly possible and typical of miracles which they thought happened quite regularly on a daily basis … but which now in the 21st century are known to be entirely untrue because they are physically impossible.

Does that mean Jesus could not have existed as real person? No. It does mean that.

But what does mean is that there appears to be no genuine evidence for his existence.

And the reason that lack of genuine evidence is suspicious is because (to repeat) religious believers at that time (and even today) had a continuous history of making entirely untrue claims of witnessing miracles and miracle working gods and messiahs.

IanS wrote:[
No! .... that church building is only evidence that people believed that Jesus existed. It is not evidence that he actually did exist!

We are not disputing that people believed Jesus existed. We all know that!

What is under dispute is whether there is actually genuine evidence that he really did exist ... and in the last few posts that "dispute" is specifically about whether the non-religious sources are offering genuine "evidence" ...

... afaik they are not reporting genuine evidence (see my reply above to Stein re. the need for primary evidence rather than hearsay).

But the belief has to come from somewhere so it is (very weak) evidence. Just like the continued survival of Homers works is weak evidence for events that it might be loosely based on.
Harry Potter on the other hand will never be evidence for anything other than fantacy writing in the 20th century because when the scientifically impossible events are removed there is nothing left of significance unlike the above.

Remove the scientific impossibilities from the Jesus tales and what is left? No more or less than the Harry Potter fantasies. At least in the case Potter we have witnesses to the author, people who know her not to mention that almost everyone has also seen her.

angelo wrote:Remove the scientific impossibilities from the Jesus tales and what is left? No more or less than the Harry Potter fantasies. At least in the case Potter we have witnesses to the author, people who know her not to mention that almost everyone has also seen her.

Which version have you read? the one I read was mostly wise sayings, curing the mentally ill, a bit of temple vandalism and a day out at the executioners.

That along with the raising of the dead, walking on water, turning water into plonk, talking with Abe and Moses, and the biggy of them all, himself coming back from the dead.

Owdhat wrote:

spin wrote:The transmission process of his texts by christian scribes when dealing with matters of christian interest renders the Josephus information void for evidentiary purposes. This difficulty is underlined by the fact that part of the infamous Testimonium Flavianum is considered by all scholars to be bogus. Any attempted use of an expurgated version is purely arbitrary and thus of no evidentiary value.

I cannot agree here, you may be right in a modern information rich situation, but as we recede into the past and the information becomes scant the line blurs and all information becomes evidence.

You are just condoning lowering your standards, but it serves no good purpose. We simply know less about a lot of things the further we go back. Lowering your standards just says you pretend to have more evidence than you really do.

Owdhat wrote:You cannot walk past it without an explanation and if you have to explain it, it must be evidence of some sort.
The Tf wether bogus or not is information that some one (early on) had a reason for writing words connected with the subject and is therefore evidence.

The TF could have been written as late as Eusebius. Two hundred years is as good as two thousand. It really doesn't matter how far you miss by. The TF would become evidence for the period it claims to represent when it can be in some way validated, as all evidence must be. Here the problem of validation is that the text is know to be corrupt. The apologist says, "well, let's remove what we don't like and the rest will be ok." If you can't see the error in such an approach then we will have little chance of communicating.

As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the Baptist, does not mention Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history of the Jews which is devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the discourse and seems suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars generally believe this to have been an insertion by some early Christian editor who, scandalised
that Joesphus should talk of the period without mentioning the Messiah, felt the insertion to be a pious act."

Isaac Asimov.

spin wrote:The apologist says, "well, let's remove what we don't like and the rest will be ok." If you can't see the error in such an approach then we will have little chance of communicating.

I can't?? well hell 'spin' I'm gonna have to revise my whole stance on the issue.

But, I know that you know those bits haven’t been just plucked out cos they don't fit a desired outcome. Methods have been employed ...........

Stein wrote:

IanS wrote:

Stein wrote:

Your assumption is flawed right at the outset. It is deliberate incitement on this board to say that only religious writings form the basis of modern secular historiography on Jesus, when half the 800+-page discussion here has centered around non-religious sources, and you very, very well know that and you very,very well know that others here know you know that, which makes your remark here deliberately provoking.

Stein

Afaik, after 800+ pages, one of the few things that everyone here now accepts is that those non-religious sources (I assume people mean things like Josephus and Tacitus), few as they are and often making only scant mention of Jesus anyway, are never more than hearsay accounts produced long after the event.

A hearsay account like that does not qualify as the original source of “evidence”. Instead it is only implying that evidence came from someone else at an earlier date ... and in the case of Josephus and Tacitus etc., afaik none of them ever say where that evidence actually came from anyway!

If you were familiar with science research, you would know that secondary sources like that are not actually evidence at all - you need to produce the original primary source of the evidence. Otherwise your claims of evidence are quite simply invalid.

The Antiqs. XX presents itself as primary evidence no less than the authentic Paulines do. It is written testimony by a contemporary who lived in Jerusalem at the same time and in the same circles that were roiled by Ananus's execution of James. One can scream up and down that this is unreliable and that is unreliable. But that makes no difference to a source's physical status. As Owdhat has just said --

"I cannot agree here, you may be right in a modern information rich situation, but as we recede into the past and the information becomes scant the line blurs and all information becomes evidence. You cannot walk past it without an explanation and if you have to explain it, it must be evidence of some sort."

There is nothing that separates the status of primary pagan sources like Antiqs. XX and Paul's 1 Corinthians except your lie that only religious writings form the evidence on which to assess the historicity/non-historicity of Jesus. You know damn well that both these documents have the same status. In fact, looking at the scripturals as a whole is to be struck by the fact that non-scripturals actually give variant accounts of certain key events like the death of James. That in itself stamps Antiqs. XX as a primary source -- in fact, a better source than Acts in particular, if it comes to that, since there are some indications that Antiqs. XX may come from a possible eyewitness whereas there are no apparent indications that Acts comes from anything of the kind.

To assert primacy for a religious canon of texts that include third-person hearsay like that found in Acts over a category of texts that include an Antiqs. XX that presents itself as a possible eye-witness account is to indulge in pernicious misinformation of the most unscrupulous sort.

Owdhat is right. These all constitute evidence of one kind or another. Pretending they don't is tantamount to book-burning or Soviet-style photo-doctoring.

Stein

If by “Antiqs. XX “ you mean the writing of Josephus - he is said to have composed that around 93AD, which is at least 60 years after Jesus was thought to have died.

So Josephus himself cannot have been an eyewitness to anything Jesus was supposed to have said or done.

But, as always, we apparently do not actually know what Josephus wrote in 93AD. Because the earliest known copy apparently dates not from anywhere near 93AD, but from the 11th century, ie one thousand years after Jesus.

And, apparently, even apart from widespread agreement that the relevant small part mentioning Jesus was the result of later Christian alteration, the first mention of this passage being recorded in Josephus apparently comes from the writing of Eusebius circa.324AD …

… all of which is found by just a cursory glance at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonium_Flavianum

On that basis, it seems that far from being a “primary source” for genuine evidence of a real Jesus, the relevant passages of Josephus are not worth discussing as any kind of evidence at all for a real Jesus.

Owdhat wrote:But the belief has to come from somewhere so it is (very weak) evidence.

The people who lower their standards enough to cite that as their 'evidence' just enjoy kissing Xianity's arse. Another word for that is 'hegemony'. To them, everything 'pertinent' is 'evident'. But you see how that makes a tautology between 'pertinent' and 'evident', and you see that 'pertinent' is subjective, since any mention of Jesus can be 'pertinent' to them unless they can cite some standards. So, the standard is 'ancient'. Without that, Sunday school stories they heard when they were 5 are not ruled out as 'pertinent'. What such people mean when they indicate something as 'pertinent' is that it is 'important' to them and their friends. They give too much credit to the goat-roasters who scribbled the ancient 'evidence'. From there, they can proceed to the 'fifty billion flies cannot possibly be wrong' fallacy.

Owdhat wrote:

IanS wrote:[
No! .... that church building is only evidence that people believed that Jesus existed. It is not evidence that he actually did exist!

We are not disputing that people believed Jesus existed. We all know that!

What is under dispute is whether there is actually genuine evidence that he really did exist ... and in the last few posts that "dispute" is specifically about whether the non-religious sources are offering genuine "evidence" ...

... afaik they are not reporting genuine evidence (see my reply above to Stein re. the need for primary evidence rather than hearsay).

But the belief has to come from somewhere so it is (very weak) evidence. Just like the continued survival of Homers works is weak evidence for events that it might be loosely based on.
Harry Potter on the other hand will never be evidence for anything other than fantacy writing in the 20th century because when the scientifically impossible events are removed there is nothing left of significance unlike the above.

No, actually it's not even weak evidence. I'll try to explain ...

... but first, I do appreciate that you are clearly trying to be entirely reasonable about this point ...

OK, what you are describing is evidence of something ... it is evidence that people believed in Jesus and built churches etc. ...

... so it is evidence. It's just not evidence that Jesus really lived.

And that's what is under discussion - the question of whether Jesus really lived.

I once had a very long and eventually extremely heated debate on the old RDF Forum with Jerome (he's a member here if you know him, ie a prominent Christian) ... incidentally it was he that became extremely heated not me (in fact he was suspended, though I had not intended that to be the outcome at all) ... but he argued that evidence for God was the fact that the Earth exits ... apparently that has long been a line of religious argument ... and when that failed he argued that "evidence" was whatever people said and was for example that which any witnesses gave in court, because he said the court called that "evidence" ....

... but of course he was entirely wrong ....

... what a witness say's in court is testimony given as evidence ... it is not necessarily evidence that the claimed events were true ... it is evidence of something ... eg it's evidence that the witness makes those particular claims ... but it is not in itself evidence that the claims have any truth ...

... it's the same with your church analogy - the fact that the church building exists and that people go there to worship and to agree amongst themselves how important Jesus was, is only evidence of their religious beliefs about Jesus ... but it is absolutely not evidence that those beliefs are true ...

IOW - that sort of thing is not even "weak evidence" of a real Jesus ... it's merely evidence that those people believed Jesus was real.

Owdhat wrote:

spin wrote:The apologist says, "well, let's remove what we don't like and the rest will be ok." If you can't see the error in such an approach then we will have little chance of communicating.

I can't?? well hell 'spin' I'm gonna have to revise my whole stance on the issue.

But, I know that you know those bits haven’t been just plucked out cos they don't fit a desired outcome.

How do you know they haven't? This has "arbitrary" painted all over it.

Owdhat wrote:Methods have been employed ...........

Whose shoes are you shining?

"Methods have been employed ...........":

A: "Umm, we can't straightfacedly use these bits... I know-- let's leave 'em out."
B: "What good'll that do? We'll never get away with that."
A: "If we leave 'em out we'll skew the text enough to fix the appearance of what's left. But there's nothing noticeably problematical with what's left."

The partial TF is one of the greatest farces of christian religious studies. There is not enough text to have a statistically significant sample of text to do linguistic comparisons, yet these jokers claim that the language that remains is reflective of Josephus's usage. (Just as an indicator, when G.H.C. MacGregor and A.Q. Morton attempted to do stylometric analyses of the Gospel of John ("The Structure of the Fourth Gospel") and of the Pauline corpus (Morton, "The Integrity of the Pauline Letters"), it was specifically the sample sizes used that they were attacked on, yet the size of the bowdlerized TF is much smaller than what those scholars used.)

Comments about Josephan style are really trivial. The best that can be said is that the words used aren't out of place. That's after we choose to remove what is glaring.

It's all just dodgy.

IanS wrote:

Stein wrote:

IanS wrote:


Afaik, after 800+ pages, one of the few things that everyone here now accepts is that those non-religious sources (I assume people mean things like Josephus and Tacitus), few as they are and often making only scant mention of Jesus anyway, are never more than hearsay accounts produced long after the event.

A hearsay account like that does not qualify as the original source of “evidence”. Instead it is only implying that evidence came from someone else at an earlier date ... and in the case of Josephus and Tacitus etc., afaik none of them ever say where that evidence actually came from anyway!

If you were familiar with science research, you would know that secondary sources like that are not actually evidence at all - you need to produce the original primary source of the evidence. Otherwise your claims of evidence are quite simply invalid.

The Antiqs. XX presents itself as primary evidence no less than the authentic Paulines do. It is written testimony by a contemporary who lived in Jerusalem at the same time and in the same circles that were roiled by Ananus's execution of James. One can scream up and down that this is unreliable and that is unreliable. But that makes no difference to a source's physical status. As Owdhat has just said --

"I cannot agree here, you may be right in a modern information rich situation, but as we recede into the past and the information becomes scant the line blurs and all information becomes evidence. You cannot walk past it without an explanation and if you have to explain it, it must be evidence of some sort."

There is nothing that separates the status of primary pagan sources like Antiqs. XX and Paul's 1 Corinthians except your lie that only religious writings form the evidence on which to assess the historicity/non-historicity of Jesus. You know damn well that both these documents have the same status. In fact, looking at the scripturals as a whole is to be struck by the fact that non-scripturals actually give variant accounts of certain key events like the death of James. That in itself stamps Antiqs. XX as a primary source -- in fact, a better source than Acts in particular, if it comes to that, since there are some indications that Antiqs. XX may come from a possible eyewitness whereas there are no apparent indications that Acts comes from anything of the kind.

To assert primacy for a religious canon of texts that include third-person hearsay like that found in Acts over a category of texts that include an Antiqs. XX that presents itself as a possible eye-witness account is to indulge in pernicious misinformation of the most unscrupulous sort.

Owdhat is right. These all constitute evidence of one kind or another. Pretending they don't is tantamount to book-burning or Soviet-style photo-doctoring.

Stein

If by “Antiqs. XX “ you mean the writing of Josephus - he is said to have composed that around 93AD, which is at least 60 years after Jesus was thought to have died.

So Josephus himself cannot have been an eyewitness to anything Jesus was supposed to have said or done.

No, he wasn't -- and I'm not talking about the TF in Antiqs. XVIII. All you mythers typically go off on the TF whenever Antiqs. XX threatens to come into view. Antiqs. XX is Josephus's autobiographical eye-witness account of Ananus' extra-legal arrest of James. Josephus was an eye-witness to things that James said and did. Antiqs. XX is a primary text from an eyewitness, and an eye-witness with no Christian axe to grind.

As is so typical, you are once again veering off the chief point here concerning a brazen statement by a poster here that no writings on Jesus exist outside of religious ones. That is totally incorrect. Non-religious writings concerning Jesus do exist and are extant in manuscript form.

The crux in this exchange does NOT involve the level of reliability of non-scriptural texts. It involves whether or not they exist at all. THEY DO. Antiqs. XX, an autobiographical non-religious account of an illegal arrest that rocked Josephus's immediate social circle, is most definitely extant in manuscript form. It exists as a physical document. You said there was no such non-religious manuscript extant. You were totally incorrect, and you have made no attempt at correcting this blatant inaccuracy. I wonder why............

IanS wrote:But, as always, we apparently do not actually know what Josephus wrote in 93AD. Because the earliest known copy apparently dates not from anywhere near 93AD, but from the 11th century, ie one thousand years after Jesus.

And, apparently, even apart from widespread agreement that the relevant small part mentioning Jesus was the result of later Christian alteration, the first mention of this passage being recorded in Josephus apparently comes from the writing of Eusebius circa.324AD …

… all of which is found by just a cursory glance at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonium_Flavianum

Wrong. The first mention of any Josephus passage referencing Jesus is Origen's referencing Jesus's brother in Antiqs. XX -- twice -- at a time before Constantine had even legalized Christianity, when no scribe -- no Odo the Wonder Monk -- was going to tamper with texts to satisfy a Christian agenda.

Stein

Stein wrote:

IanS wrote:If by “Antiqs. XX “ you mean the writing of Josephus - he is said to have composed that around 93AD, which is at least 60 years after Jesus was thought to have died.

So Josephus himself cannot have been an eyewitness to anything Jesus was supposed to have said or done.

No, he wasn't -- and I'm not talking about the TF in Antiqs. XVIII. All you mythers typically go off on the TF whenever Antiqs. XX threatens to come into view. Antiqs. XX is Josephus's autobiographical eye-witness account of Ananus' extra-legal arrest of James. Josephus was an eye-witness to things that James said and did. Antiqs. XX is a primary text from an eyewitness, and an eye-witness with no Christian axe to grind.

As is so typical, you are once again veering off the chief point here concerning a brazen statement by a poster here that no writings on Jesus exist outside of religious ones. That is totally incorrect. Non-religious writings concerning Jesus do exist and are extant in manuscript form.

The crux in this exchange does NOT involve the level of reliability of non-scriptural texts. It involves whether or not they exist at all. THEY DO. Antiqs. XX, an autobiographical non-religious account of an illegal arrest that rocked Josephus's immediate social circle, is most definitely extant in manuscript form. It exists as a physical document. You said there was no such non-religious manuscript extant. You were totally incorrect, and you have made no attempt at correcting this blatant inaccuracy. I wonder why............

Stein has been trying to get this general silliness to float so long, you'd think he'd learn better. And note the sense of seriousness he can muster with this bullshit:

Antiqs. XX is Josephus's autobiographical eye-witness account of Ananus' extra-legal arrest of James. Josephus was an eye-witness to things that James said and did. Antiqs. XX is a primary text from an eyewitness, and an eye-witness with no Christian axe to grind.

Eye-witness account? Stein pulled that out of his imagination. He may want to believe that Josephus was privy to the events, but it's just for his sense of melodrama. Josephus knew nothing about the arrest when he wrote his Jewish War, so he certainly wasn't an eye-witness to the execution of James. In fact Josephus was glowing about this Ananus in that work to the point of blaming his illegal death for the destruction of Jerusalem. "I should not be wrong in saying that the capture of the city began with the death of Ananus", (JB 4.318).

So let's cut the baseless eye-witness claim.

Stein wrote:

IanS wrote:But, as always, we apparently do not actually know what Josephus wrote in 93AD. Because the earliest known copy apparently dates not from anywhere near 93AD, but from the 11th century, ie one thousand years after Jesus.

And, apparently, even apart from widespread agreement that the relevant small part mentioning Jesus was the result of later Christian alteration, the first mention of this passage being recorded in Josephus apparently comes from the writing of Eusebius circa.324AD …

… all of which is found by just a cursory glance at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimonium_Flavianum

Wrong. The first mention of any Josephus passage referencing Jesus is Origen's referencing Jesus's brother in Antiqs. XX -- twice --...

Three times: twice in Contra Celsus and once in his commentary on Matthew. Never does Origen cite AJ 20.200, though he can reference AJ 18, where he knew a passage on JtB was to be found. Here's Origen's longest passage on the material:

For in the eighteenth volume of the Judaic Antiquities Josephus testifies to John as having been a baptist and promised cleansing to those who were baptized. But he himself, though not believing in Jesus as Christ, in seeking the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these things happening to the people, since they killed the prophecied Christ, even says, being unwillingly not far from the truth, that these things befell the Jews as vengeance for James the just, who was a brother of Jesus who is called Christ, since they killed him who was most just. Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he saw this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood or of their common upbringing as on account of his ethics and speech. If, therefore, he says that the things surrounding the desolation of Jerusalem befell the Jews on account of James, how is it not more reasonable to say that it happened on account of Jesus the Christ?

Origen is under the false belief that Josephus blamed the death of James for the fall of Jerusalem, though Josephus never made such a statement. In fact as we saw earlier he attributed the fall of Jerusalem to the death of Ananus. One thing seems rather certain from what we read in Origen here: he wasn't reading Josephus. The only thing that is similar with the passage now found in AJ 20.200 is the partial phrase "James the just, the brother of Jesus called christ"... well not quite, it should be "the brother of Jesus called christ James by name". The word order is different and Josephus knows nothing about his title "James the Just". Origen's first mention of James and Josephus was in his Commentary on Matthew, the gospel where we find the description "Jesus called christ" (1:16).

The first church father to show knowledge of James being the brother of the Lord=Jesus is Hegesippus (c. 170, cited in Eusebius, EH 2.23), who describes the death of this James who was called "Just" and who lays blame on the fall of Jerusalem on the murder of James. The name Hegesippus has been confused with Josephus and it was early connected with a Latin epitome of AJ., though it was a christian work. Origen, who obviously didn't get his facts from Josephus, tells the basic story of Hegesippus, who is the best candidate for Origen's source. But while Hegesippus tells the story that Origen does, he doesn't use the phrase "the brother of Jesus called christ James by name" or the one that Origen uses, "James the just, the brother of Jesus called christ". He talks of "the lord's brother James, who everyone from the lord's time till our own has called the Just".

Origen is not helpful as a witness to Josephus, but he is useful in showing the development of the phrase now found in AJ 20.200: "the brother of Jesus called christ James by name". When Eusebius (later in EH 2.23) cites Origen's comment above, he doesn't attribute it to Origen, but directly to Josephus, ie Eusebius lifted the material out of Origen thinking that Origen got them from Josephus, though not AJ 20.200, for Eusebius quotes 20.200 immediately afterwards! Yes, Eusebius, reading Origen, thinks that the passage is from Josephus, but not from 20.200!

Origen brings to his phrase "James the brother of Jesus called christ" in his Commentary on Matthew the description "Jesus called christ" out of Mt 1:16. He liked the phrase enough to use twice more, but this time adding "the Just", hence "James the just, the brother of Jesus called christ". If Eusebius could think that this was written by Josephus and only cite by Origen, then others would have had no problem doing so as well. So, what happens when a scribe finds only the following?

So [Ananus] assembled a council of judges and brought before it one James and several others, on the charge of breaking the law, and handed them over to be stoned.

The likely thing is to note in the margin that this James was, to use Origen's phrase, "the brother of Jesus called christ", which should be in the text, given Origen's comment. Then we get the telling event of a second scribe, finding the comment in the margin, inserting it, not to form "James the brother of Jesus called christ", as would be more natural in the discourse of the text, but as "the brother of Jesus called christ James by name", because the fact that he is Jesus's brother is more important than the rest of the statement.

This causes the strange structure of putting the descriptor before the subject of interest, which is marker language in Josephus, who does use the inverted word order, but for people just mentioned in the text or for people famous enough outside the text. The word order for Jesus's benefit reflects christian sensibilities, not Josephus's narrative needs. Besides, Josephus, despite the fact that χριστος is used many times in the LXX, apparently uses this now christian term only once... regarding Jesus. The phrase now found in Josephus is christian in origin.

Stein wrote:...at a time before Constantine had even legalized Christianity, when no scribe -- no Odo the Wonder Monk -- was going to tamper with texts to satisfy a Christian agenda.

Stein needs to let his silly straw dogs lie. Witness tampering has always been popular. But nothing happened here that was not above board. There were no bad motives involved in the process that gave us the christian phrase in AJ 20:200. The levels of scholarship were certainly different. Just as Eusebius can mistake the work of Origen for Josephus, so can modern pundits mistake the work of Hegesippus in Origen for that of Josephus. Just as Eusebius can mistake the work of Origen for Josephus, so can an early scribe do the same and put a correction in the margin of his defective copy of Josephus.

Again, note how this is yet another myther who, rather than addressing the cold-hard-brass-tacks-fact that Antiqs. XX is a primary physical EXTANT non-religious writing with bearing on Jesus, goes tearing off on a screed as to its reliability instead. IanS's paren on religious writing (http://www.rationalskepticism.org/chris ... l#p1004292) did not relate to non-religious writings' level of reliability. It related to their existence. Fact: Such non-religious writings exist as part of the primary data on Jesus. Fact: IanS lied when he said they don't exist, and he lied knowingly since he has been a participant in this thread for months during which there have been countless discussions on these same non-religious writings. IanS still refuses to concede that his paren was a fucking lie and a deliberate provocation.

Stein

spin wrote: <usual goal-post-shifting acrobatics>

Stein wrote:Again, note how this is yet another myther...

You know you are deliberately making a false accusation, Stein. Retract it now.

I have clearly and persistently put my position of agnosticism forward on this forum. And so that don't try to wriggle out of your accusation, note that with "this is yet another myther" you were responding to me given your fossilized cut from my post, "<usual goal-post-shifting acrobatics>".

You earlier were getting ready to accuse me of holocaust denial. You are acting in a disgraceful manner. Is this the best you can do for your lack of content? You cannot respond to evidence. You cannot respond to argument. You go for pure ad hominem.

Stein wrote:...who, rather than addressing the cold-hard-brass-tacks-fact

This mantra is unanalyzing claptrap.

Stein wrote:that Antiqs. XX is a primary physical EXTANT non-religious writing with bearing on Jesus,

Preserved by christian scribes, who have been known to add to texts, such as elsewhere in Josephus. So, the only place in Josephus that mentions the preferred christian term χριστος concerns Jesus, only place beside the admittedly fake parts of the Testimonium Flavianum. And to this obvious sign of a problem you say, like Eric Idle, "No, never!"

Stein wrote:goes tearing off on a screed as to its reliability instead. IanS's paren on religious writing (http://www.rationalskepticism.org/chris ... l#p1004292) did not relate to non-religious writings' level of reliability. It related to their existence. Fact: Such non-religious writings exist as part of the primary data on Jesus. Fact: IanS lied when he said they don't exist, and he lied knowingly since he has been a participant in this thread for months during which there have been countless discussions on these same non-religious writings. IanS still refuses to concede that his paren was a fucking lie and a deliberate provocation.

Stein

spin wrote: <usual goal-post-shifting acrobatics>

This total lack of acumen with the material explains your ad hominems.

Owdhat wrote:....Harry Potter on the other hand will never be evidence for anything other than fantacy writing in the 20th century because when the scientifically impossible events are removed there is nothing left of significance unlike the above.

The book Harry Potter can be used as EVIDENCE in many instances.

It is NOT allowed that anything be removed from the Harry Potter book.

One cannot REMOVE the evidence and then claim there is NONE.

The "Scientifically impossible events" are the written EVIDENCE that the Harry Potter character is BIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.