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Post by timoneill on Mar 2, 2013 3:21:30 GMT
IIRC there is an Arabic-language version of Josephus that does not have the evident copyist marginalia but does have the remainder of the passage in question. There's both an Arabic and a Syriac translation of Agapius which has his paraphrase of the TF without the obvious Christian interpolations. I'd argue this represents a paraphrase of the pre-interpolation version of Antiquities XVIII.3.4. The Mythers dismiss this and go with Alice Whealey's assessment that Agapius was paraphrasing Eusebius' version of the TF, not some earlier version. My problem with this is that it's very odd that a Christian writer's paraphrase would leave out the very elements that made this passage of interest to Christian writers - the stuff about Jesus being the Messiah and rising from the dead - and yet include everything else. No, he just does what Mythers always do and argues for interpolation. I have a number of objections to his argument, as I understand it, but I'll wait until I've read his paper. As far as I can tell he thinks the words "who was called the Messiah" are a marginal note that found its way into the text and Antiquities XX.9.1 was not referring to Jesus but rather to Jesus the son of Damneus mentioned later in the passage. Part of his argument seems to be based on the awkward Greek grammar of the sentence in question, saying this indicates interpolation. It's better explained as a use of casus pendens - a kind of Semitic grammatical construction we find many places elsewhere in Josephus. This means its grammar is actually evidence that the phrase is original to Josephus, as it's a sign of his slightly clumsy Greek.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Mar 2, 2013 10:25:52 GMT
A bit off topic, but in Whealey's critical discussion of Olson's case that Eusebius forged the Testimonium Flavianum (not the assessment Tim refers to), she gives an example of an earlier scholar Solomn Zeitlin arguing the case in 1928. That article by Zeitlin can be found here (with comments in double square brackets): www.christianorigins.com/zeitlin.html
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Post by ignorantianescia on Mar 4, 2013 18:21:57 GMT
Finally having read the article, I must say I loved his thinly veiled attempt to plug his latest book on page 497, footnote 17.
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Post by sandwiches on Mar 4, 2013 20:09:28 GMT
The whole article is a joke. Apparently, those copyists didn't know what they were doing. They were always adding notes which other equally dim copyists took to be text and added into later copies: From then on, the reader would be unable to know where the inserted text originated from or even that it had been inserted. All subsequent copies would appear likewise. All along, however, it would just have been an innocent mistake.
The scholars then all worked from the same copy drawn up by these idiot copyists: We must conclude that all extant manuscripts of the AJ almost certainly derive from the manuscript used by Eusebius, which was likely a copy of the manuscript used by Origen.In fact these scholars were so drunk they did not even know which script they were picking up: Could Origen have mistakenly opened and read a scroll from Hegesippus’s Commentaries thinking he was reading a work by Josephus?Of course he did: The conclusion is unavoidable: it is very unlikely that Origen draws upon Josephus, but very likely that he paraphrases Hegesippus and confused the attribution.In fact: That Origen mistook Hegesippus for Josephus is more than adequately convincing.And furthermore, those scribes/copyists just could not tell their Jesus's apart: In fact, the text may have originally said, “the brother of Jesus ben Damneus, the name for whom was James, and some others.” Since “Jesus ben Damneus” appears again a few lines later (and as I have argued, it is more likely that Josephus actually meant this Jesus), a scribe who saw a marginal note “who was called Christ” (τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ) scribbled above “ben Damneus” (τὸν τοῦ Δαμναίου), regardless of how or why it came to be written there, may have inferred a dittography.Incidently Larry Hurtado's blog recently had an interesting item about the probable accuracy or otherwise of Christian copyists: larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/a-substantial-study-of-early-christian-manuscripts/A Substantial Study of Early Christian ManuscriptsIn the heart of his thesis (“Part B”), Mugridge analyses the 516 manuscripts according to a very wide list of features, showing that the great majority exhibit features that reflect trained, experienced and skilled copyists. For each manuscript he examined the copyist’s “hand”, the size/dimensions of the manuscript, page layout, any “reader’s aids” (e.g., titles/headings, paragraph markers, sense-lines, stichometric counts, punctuation, diaeresis, apostrophe, breathing marks), letter-height, interlinear spacing, letters per line, lines per column, and other textual featurs such as line-fillers, critical signs and corrections, marginal notes, decorations, and abbreviations (especially the distinctive Christian abbreviated forms called ”nomina sacra”).His key conclusion is that the great majority of early Christian literary texts were copied by experienced, trained copyists, although often not those of highest calligraphic abilities. This is not really a new view, but Mugridge provides by far the most thorough-going accumulation of data in defence of it. The matter has been disputed, with some claiming that early Christian manuscripts exhibit a lack of regard for the texts in question, and/or that the copyists were untrained amateurs. Mugrdige seems to me, however, to have established securely the fundamental point that the copyists of early Christian literary texts were, in the main, trained and skilled individuals.
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Post by sankari on Mar 4, 2013 21:06:30 GMT
Ahahaha! AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
;D
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Post by sankari on Mar 4, 2013 21:07:38 GMT
This is an excellent article, thanks for the link.
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Post by neodawson on Mar 4, 2013 23:05:42 GMT
Wow that's some profound speculation Carrier has there. I never knew one could draw definitive conclusions from probabilities(well assuming his arguments count even as those).
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Post by himself on Mar 7, 2013 0:50:00 GMT
Apparently, Carrier has acquired a superficial acquaintance with Bayesian statistics, one which has caused sundry statisticians who have encountered it to shake their heads in sadness. He seems to regard it as a magical potion.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jun 24, 2013 21:17:31 GMT
Has the almighty lord Carrier so far tried to harmonise his theory that Origen adroitly inserted "the brother of Jesus called Christ" without qualification after several instances of "James" with Origen's ardent support for Mary's perpetual virginity?
A few months ago I had read something to the effect of Origen not calling James Jesus' brother except when quoting (but have lost the reference since, if anybody knows anything about it and would share that I'd appreciate it very much). If that is indeed correct, then that is almost a broadside to his Bayesianness's pet theory.
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Post by colingreen on Jan 11, 2016 14:51:21 GMT
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jan 11, 2016 20:59:15 GMT
Hi Colin, welcome to this forum.
I'm sorry to say, but I misremembered the reference back then. It was in fact a statement about Eusebius, though from a paper that also mentioned Origen quite a lot (in the preceding paragraph as well). Eusebius hardly ever calls James the Just Jesus' brother according to Alice Whealey beside the phrase "brother of the Lord", which is of course a quote from Paul's epistles.
This is the paper: Alice Whealey, "Josephus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and the Testimonium Flavianum", in Christfried Böttrich (ed.), Josephus und das neue Testament, 113. You can access this page on Google Books and it is easily found if you include "Olson" in your search.
The closest thing to this for Origen is that he stressed that Jesus and James were not biological brothers. Mentions of this are in the same paper on page 75, footnote 9, and page 113 again.
Wow, that post you wrote is absolutely massive! I've only read the first sections and perused the rest for overview, but it struck me as work of good quality. Thanks for linking it.
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Post by unkleE on Jan 12, 2016 9:45:44 GMT
Yes, the length of your analysis was a little beyond me, and I too read at first, then skimmed, but I appreciated the thought that had gone into it. Carrier is unfortunately (for him) getting a reputation for hubris about the certainty of his own opinions, even when he is contradicted by those far more expert than him - e.g. I've seen him argue cosmology with a real cosmologist and end up totally discredited, and I've seen a couple of people expose his huge misunderstandings of probability (notwithstanding that he's written a book on the topic!). That being the case, I suppose someone's got to analyse his historical work, granted he does have qualifications in history, and I salute you for doing the hard yards. It seems, as usual, his case is made up of alleged interpolations that cannot be demonstrated and vague possibilities that harden during his writing to become certainties by the end.
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Post by colingreen on Jan 15, 2016 13:52:39 GMT
Thank you so much, both of you, for replying, much appreciated. I'll go to the Whealey article.
I know I wrote too much - on the other hand, I felt it was time to systematically deal with some of his work in a way that none of us really probably has time to do normally.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jan 15, 2016 18:20:52 GMT
I know I wrote too much - on the other hand, I felt it was time to systematically deal with some of his work in a way that none of us really probably has time to do normally. I read your entire post and thought you raised a number of excellent, new points about Carrier's article. But the post in its entirety is simply going to be inaccessible for a lot of people. Perhaps you could offer a digest or some quoted highlights of some of your strongest arguments? I'd consider your segments about how Carrier's dismissal of the 6-word correspondence between Josephus and Origen as dependence but eager acceptance of the 4-word correlation with Hegesippus don't suggest balance, how "brother of Jesus" and "who was called Christ" don't seem to be popular idioms and how readings of Jesus as "Jesus ben Damnaios" and "Jesus w.i.c. Christ" compare as worthy of more prominent mention in a separate post.
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