ergo, Josephus was a Justin Bieber fan

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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stephan happy huller
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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My interest is why the editor of the New Testament decided to go with the Aretas story. I think Josephus was edited to support a number of ludicrous stories in the New Testament. I just can't figure out why. If you are going to make up shit about Paul why not make up shit within the confines of accepted history? Why make up a story that defies history? One possibility might be that he wants to show that the gospel (= the teaching of Christianity) was already transforming and 'shaking up' the world. It might be a big theme to counter Celsus and other pagans who questioned why Christianity didn't make more of an impact in the world what it first came. John the Baptist is in the middle of the battle between Herod and Aretas. Paul is affecting the world rulers. The Jews are raging against him so too the world rulers. The editor might not have wanted to have Paul as defying the Roman rulers of Damascus as in Acts so he invents a foreign power at odds with Rome controlling the city for a brief period so that Paul could be defending other powers beside the Roman government. The theme that Christianity was a fugitive religion was quite prevalent in the late second century - the time Irenaeus was editing the New Testament. Celsus says it a number of times so the new story inserted into 2 Corinthians 11 is to show that Christianity was always obedient to Roman authority.

Remember the original Marcionite narrative just has Paul acting like a thief secretly writing and instructing his followers about the coming day when they rule the world. Not good if your trying to kiss the ass (and any other parts) of Commodus like Irenaeus was.
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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stephan happy huller wrote:My interest is why the editor of the New Testament decided to go with the Aretas story. I think Josephus was edited to support a number of ludicrous stories in the New Testament. I just can't figure out why. If you are going to make up shit about Paul why not make up shit within the confines of accepted history? Why make up a story that defies history?
Haven't you talked yourself into your own dilemma? I agree to the two interpolations about Jesus. But there's nothing else in Josephus that's really apologetic... and if you did want one that were infused with Christian legends, you'd end up with something closer to the Slavonic Josephus. It's seems more elegant just to vote in favor of the hypothesis that you yourself make more sense out of, that the NT writers adorned their stories with existing tidbits of the known world.

Don't forget that literary remains aren't everything. Having actual people in your story means that people who can't read (most people) will know about your characters, something that isn't true if you just insert it into a copy of Josephus gathering dust somewhere.

I found out something interesting the other day. Gallio, proconsul in Corinth, that old bedrock of Pauline chronology. Wow, what a neat little coincidental detail, surely this is a sign of authenticity! I remember thinking so the first time I heard of him, probably in a Josh McDowell book in a municipal library many years ago. But what I was just reading about Gallio is this: Gallio was the brother of Seneca. Interesting! He was known for his charm and was involved in politics under Nero. Most interesting, though, is that he seems to have been forced to commit suicide after being accused of conspiracy under the reign of Nero. So here we have an innocent man, well-beloved, who has been made victim of the cruelties under neurotic Nero, passing judgment on another innocent man, well-beloved, who is soon to appeal his case to Caesar. Part of the aim of Acts is to exonerate Paul from any taint of guilt for his activity, as also seen from the later seen in which three different people cannot convict him. What we actually see here is that Gallio is an earlier reminder of the same thing, a man who is known for his eloquence, who was himself judged wrongly, who cannot find anything wrong with Paul. This doesn't work if you don't pick a Gallio and instead choose someone lesser-known.
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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Haven't you talked yourself into your own dilemma?
But I don't have an agenda. I try to see things from every point of view in order to get at the truth. If the passage is corrupt someone had to have added this material to the Marcionite text. It was definitively not written by Paul. So it becomes imperative to figure out what the motivation of the forger was - i.e why he did it - rather than just be content to dismiss the entire epistle.
I agree to the two interpolations about Jesus. But there's nothing else in Josephus that's really apologetic... and if you did want one that were infused with Christian legends, you'd end up with something closer to the Slavonic Josephus.
But there is no Slavonic equivalent of Antiquities. Even the structure of Antiquities is odd. Why could an Aramaic speaking 'former Pharisee' have embarked on a project to imitate Dionysius's Roman Antiquities for the Jewish people? Fucking strange in itself. The ancient equivalent of a former Taliban deciding to remake the story of the Prophet into a Broadway musical.
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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But there's nothing else in Josephus that's really apologetic
No Josephus is reactionary. It's just that we no longer remember the contemporary obsession with identifying the destruction of the Jewish temple with Daniel 9:24 - 27. Josephus is nothing more than a clandestine Caucasian plot to undermine the original Jewish and Christian understanding of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE as being predicted by Daniel.

http://books.google.com/books?id=LfYisj ... ks&f=false

It is not accidental that Josephus avoids making explicit the connection between Daniel and the destruction. It is the very point of the narrative - the heretics (Jewish and Christian) were wrong for identifying the destruction of Jerusalem as marking the end of 6000 years of history (Jesus comes 49 years before to announce the coming end in the Jubilee).
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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It is a curious fact about Josephus that while he delights in narrating stories about portents and miracles, 'when it comes to expecting concrete extraordinary actions of divine salvation in the present, he was reluctant.' This same reluctance characterizes his approach to Nebuchadnezzar's dream ... In underscoring the futility of using Daniel for oracular purposes, we may suspect that Josephus' intention was to dampen the eschatological hope that Daniel offered in the face of Roman occupation. Precisely the same motive underlies Josephus' highly cautious handling of Daniel's apocalypse of 70 weeks. Here too Josephus was troubled by the appeal that anti-Roman Jewish political factions were making to what Josephus considered the 'ambiguous oracle' of Daniel 9.
Of course contemporary Jews and Christians had just the opposite approach. Daniel 9:24 - 27 is the last and greatest of the prophecies of the Book. Why does Josephus stand so far apart from his contemporaries. Because the Greek text is a deliberate corruption of the original Aramaic hypomnema identified by Shaye Cohen and others. The 'assistants' were second century editors deliberately corrupting Josephus into a spokesman for their own agenda of rescuing Judaism or Christianity (perhaps both at different times) from the heretics. Turner identifies a strange parallel that a historical written by a Josephus was known to have been established on the 77th anniversary of the end of the Jewish War i.e. the destruction (= 147 CE). I have always thought some connection existed between this text and Hegesippus but have been unsuccessful thus far to prove it.
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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From Turner's article in the Journal of Theological Studies.
The existence of a chronographer of the tenth year of Antoninus Pius (AD 147-148) has been assumed in explanation of the curious coincidence that both Clement of Alexandria (once) and Epiphanius (once) employ this year as a term in chronological calculations. The latter interrupts his series of bishops of Jerusalem, after the twentieth bishop Julianus, with the note 'all these down to the tenth year of A. Pius,' Haer. lxvi 1. The former tells us that ' Josephus reckons from Moses to David to the second year of Vespasian 1179 years, and from that to the tenth of Antoninus seventy-two years,' Strom, i 21 147; and as the mention of this this last date cannot come either from Josephus, who wrote half a century before it, or from Clement himself, who wrote half a century after it, it is a reasonable supposition that it is borrowed from some other intermediate writer, who will also have been the source of Epiphanius. This lost writer is conjectured by Schlatter l, following von Gutschmid, to be identical with the Judas mentioned above ; but something more than mere conjecture is wanted before we can accuse Eusebius of mistaking the tenth year of of Severus for the tenth of A. Pius. With better judgement, Harnack suggests Cassianus was the author, we have seen that Eusebius knew nothing of him ; if Judas, we must conclude that Eusebius knew next to nothing of a book which ex hypothesi he dated fifty years too late.[Journal of Theological Studies 1900 p. 193 - 194]
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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stephan happy huller wrote:Even the structure of Antiquities is odd. Why could an Aramaic speaking 'former Pharisee' have embarked on a project to imitate Dionysius's Roman Antiquities for the Jewish people? Fucking strange in itself. The ancient equivalent of a former Taliban deciding to remake the story of the Prophet into a Broadway musical.
Truly the only thing stranger would be a Christian feigning to be a Jew writing after the manner of the Romans. But this Josephus, he's traded up. He's got new friends now, and he aims to impress his Greek-speaking Roman audience. It's not too hard to see why, really, and I will use your own analogy. Plenty of Muslims have educated themselves at western institutions and write in a way modeled primarily after their western (and Christian) peers. Western European culture has the same kind of hegemon today that the Roman one did back then. If you want to make an impact in the real world, you make it in a way visible and appreciable by the elite. Today they watch TED talks, and back then they talked shop on the streets of Rome and Athens.
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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Peter Kirby wrote:


I found out something interesting the other day. Gallio, proconsul in Corinth, that old bedrock of Pauline chronology. Wow, what a neat little coincidental detail, surely this is a sign of authenticity! I remember thinking so the first time I heard of him, probably in a Josh McDowell book in a municipal library many years ago. But what I was just reading about Gallio is this: Gallio was the brother of Seneca. Interesting! He was known for his charm and was involved in politics under Nero. Most interesting, though, is that he seems to have been forced to commit suicide after being accused of conspiracy under the reign of Nero. So here we have an innocent man, well-beloved, who has been made victim of the cruelties under neurotic Nero, passing judgment on another innocent man, well-beloved, who is soon to appeal his case to Caesar. Part of the aim of Acts is to exonerate Paul from any taint of guilt for his activity, as also seen from the later seen in which three different people cannot convict him. What we actually see here is that Gallio is an earlier reminder of the same thing, a man who is known for his eloquence, who was himself judged wrongly, who cannot find anything wrong with Paul. This doesn't work if you don't pick a Gallio and instead choose someone lesser-known.
Our only knowledge of the end of Gallio (from Jerome's version of Eusebius' chronicle) is
Junius Annaeus Gallio, the brother of Seneca the outstanding declaimer, killed himself with his own hand,
It is speculation (even if plausible speculation) to say he was a victim of Nero.

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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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Truly the only thing stranger would be a Christian feigning to be a Jew writing after the manner of the Romans.
Not really. The Pharisees eschewed foreign influence. That's the part we have to get over. What would make a (former) Pharisee give up what was essential to his tradition and embark on a conscious imitation of everything his former belief system rejected - i.e. becoming a pagan writer with the help of Greek 'assistants in order to defend Judaism'? That's what we have in the works of Josephus. If you read Vita and look at all Josephus was accused of orchestrating in Galilee - i.e. the most backwards Taliban-like policies and then look at his alleged literary output after the war it is simply mind-boggling. The fact that the text exists is the only argument for its plausibility. If we heard about the text through some ancient source we'd have our doubts about its authenticity.

I think we aren't that far removed from Shaye Cohen's thesis when we suggest that someone just came across an Aramaic hypomnema that formed the basis to Vita and then expanded it in a second century literary forgery to create the Jewish Wars (perhaps with help from Justin of Tiberias's lost Chronicle). The shift from third to first person is particularly jarring in Jewish Wars.

There is a close parallel with the orthodox writings attributed to Paul - i.e. the Pastorals. Paul is not this person. This is a second century forgery making Paul appear to be a conservative Jew who happens to hold Roman middle class values and write in Greek. Paul was something else originally than the portrait in the Pastorals. So too with Josephus. But their world outlook after successive forgeries is basically the same.

Let's not forget that Josephus mentions a Saul who violently persecutes Jewish peasants, hobnobs with powerful men in Judea, appears related to Herodian rulers, and participates in scenes paralleled in Acts. I think this, the references to James, John, Jesus and many others are all second century plants by the same editor of much of the New Testament forgeries - Polycarp?
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Re: evidence of an earthly human Jesus in the Pauline epistl

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stephan happy huller wrote:What would make a (former) Pharisee give up what was essential to his tradition and embark on a conscious imitation of everything his former belief system rejected - i.e. becoming a pagan writer with the help of Greek 'assistants in order to defend Judaism'?
Greco-Roman culture was superior to barbarian Jewish culture, to the better part of the people of Rome anyway, and the gig paid well.
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