Columbia PhD in Ancient History says Jesus never existed

[alwayson]

How do Christians respond to Dr. Richard Carrier?

There are several lectures and debates with him on youtube.

[stubbornone]

One can only conclude from this post that the argument is grotesquely dishonest. Post #287 REPROVIDES exactly what Nickman, and apparent master of all things relating to Christian evidence in unaware of. Its been provided before, and equally ignored.

Post 287 is you posting a link to a book and saying read this and educate yourself, which is outside of the rules and etiquette of the forum. That is improper debate. You must provide an argument then source it with quotes to the part you are citing. Giving me a book that you like means nothing. Please read the rules and print them out. Then place them on your computer desk and read them before each post. This will help you educate yourself on proper debate.

When a poster is too lazy to click on links providing exactly what he is asking for, one can only conclude that such extreme laziness is a sign of the intent to avoid an actual search for the truth. A clarion, "Believing in my speculation rather than ... er, actual evidence. Harrah the Jesus Myth!"

Again, your not posting within regs. It is laziness to just post a book and say "here read it". You bring nothing to the debate and are out of regs.

Again, he claims that his opinion is based on scholarship and evidence, but he provides none and pointedly ignores evidence when provided.

Blanket statement
5. Support your assertions/arguments with evidence. Do not persist in making a claim without supporting it. All unsupported claims can be challenged for supporting evidence. Opinions require no support, but they should not be considered as valid to any argument, nor will they be considered as legitimate support for any claim.

If any greater evidence were needed to prove that the Jesus Myth was little more than a bigoted conspiracy theory, Nickman's latest bland denial provides ample fodder for that case.

Blanket statement

Again, lets open the floor to anyone as Nickman will not only not answer the questions posed to him, but is actively claiming that questions asked were answered somewhere, where, like the scholars he is referencing, we can only guess at.

Why should we treat such an opinion as if its the result of study rather than ignorance and bigoted bias?

As stated before, you are asking me questions I have been engaged in for days now. If you want to know the answers read my posts. I have answered every question on your list in posts to Mithrae, Historia and Eden. Im not gonna repeat myself just because you want to jump in mid conversation and disregard what has already been debated.

Its my posting to a book, AND to the results of a google search that provide thousands of individual links to sources. That is addition to previously provided DIRECT links short lists of documents that are commonly examined in the evidental record.

Here is one of them directly again:

http://carm.org/non-biblical-accounts-n ... dor-people

That one was previously provided as well. Yet here you are claiming that no evidence has been provided.

Which goes directly to the second part ....

You claim that you have previously addressed the question of respectability. That is as dishonest as you repeatedly claims that there is no evidence outside the Bible and that the gospels were all Second Century and later ... factually wrong - yet you make them anyway.

Those statement go DIRECTLY to the credibilty of your claims. Because the ONLY statement you have made were that your 'opinion' was the result of evidence and scholarship.

You never listed the scholars you have studied. You never listed any source, save Rationalwiki, and indeed your ENTIRE analysis appears to be an after the fact rip off DIRECTLY from the site (plagurism):

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jesus_myth

(Notice the references to James brother of Jesus, which has almost nothing to do with the evidence for Jesus, but was blindly dumped onto the web site - where it was equally blindly parroted here by you, interesting, no?)

This is not scholarship, and calling that website and reasoned examination of Christian documentation is reason enough, in and of itself to question the validity of your position entirely.

ALl you appear to have done is ripped off ONE atheist web site, which isn't even a cliff notes of the actual argumentation, while claiming it is 'scholarship' and evidence that drove your opinion? As you continue to ignore evidence and make factually inaccurate statements?

Why again should we treat the unthinking plagurism of a rationalwiki as serious scholarship?

Is this the reason you are so reluctant to share your sources? (I am guessing yes)

[EduChris]

...the Jesus Myth...At what point do we simply dismiss it? Acknowledge that it is tomfoolery?

The "Jesus Myth" theory stands on the same footing as the "Flat Earth" theory. Unless and until someone comes up with some new evidence to support such theories, we are already well past the "tomfoolery" stage. As such, it's probably best to spend time debating other topics where the issue is not already decided by an overwhelming consensus of scholars in the field.

[stubbornone]

One can only conclude from this post that the argument is grotesquely dishonest.

Again, he claims that his opinion is based on scholarship and evidence, but he provides none and pointedly ignores evidence when provided.

Blanket statement
5. Support your assertions/arguments with evidence. Do not persist in making a claim without supporting it. All unsupported claims can be challenged for supporting evidence. Opinions require no support, but they should not be considered as valid to any argument, nor will they be considered as legitimate support for any claim.

By all means Nickam, instead of claiming that you 'previously addressed it' . prove it.

If you are going to quote rules, you had best make sure you are following them.

Particularly when you tell a person who is providing you with a book, a list of THOUSANDS OF LINKS, and direct links to lists of the very documents you claim don't exist ...

Well, we should take your claims as fact because you say so?

You quoted the rules, now pony up.

And it is exactly these kinds of antics that lead me to question the validity of your position entirely.

[stubbornone]

...the Jesus Myth...At what point do we simply dismiss it? Acknowledge that it is tomfoolery?

The "Jesus Myth" theory stands on the same footing as the "Flat Earth" theory. Unless and until someone comes up with some new evidence to support such theories, we are already well past the "tomfoolery" stage. As such, it's probably best to spend time debating other topics where the issue is not already decided by an overwhelming consensus of scholars in the field.

Agreed, except for one thing.

It is quite common in the atheist community. It is taught as fact, and as we see right here on this thread, it is gaining adherents despite the silliness of its claims.

Indeed, we had another one just yesterday:

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... hp?t=21876

It prays upon the weak and ignorant, and, as we see right here on this thread, is advocated with great gusto and with every little excuse imaginable to back it up.

Should we not hold those organizations that spread deliberate lies accountable for their actions? Should we not demonstrate just how barren of intelligence the claim is? And ask those who believed in such nonsense to return to the sources where they garnered such deliberate miseducation and they themselves ask why they were so badly miseducated?

[Nickman]

East, he's been shown this several times, and still he persists on making factually inaccurate statements:

Date Rage:
30-60 Passion Narrative
40-80 Lost Sayings Gospel Q
50-60 1 Thessalonians
50-60 Philippians
50-60 Galatians
50-60 1 Corinthians
50-60 2 Corinthians
50-60 Romans
50-60 Philemon
50-80 Colossians
50-90 Signs Gospel
50-95 Book of Hebrews
50-120 Didache
50-140 Gospel of Thomas
50-140 Oxyrhynchus 1224 Gospel
50-200 Sophia of Jesus Christ
65-80 Gospel of Mark
70-100 Epistle of James
70-120 Egerton Gospel
70-160 Gospel of Peter
70-160 Secret Mark
70-200 Fayyum Fragment
70-200 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
73-200 Mara Bar Serapion
80-100 2 Thessalonians
80-100 Ephesians
80-100 Gospel of Matthew
80-110 1 Peter
80-120 Epistle of Barnabas
80-130 Gospel of Luke
80-130 Acts of the Apostles
80-140 1 Clement
80-150 Gospel of the Egyptians
80-150 Gospel of the Hebrews
80-250 Christian Sibyllines
90-95 Apocalypse of John
90-120 Gospel of John
90-120 1 John
90-120 2 John
90-120 3 John
90-120 Epistle of Jude
93 Flavius Josephus

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

And yet, even though most of the gospels are CLEARLY first century, he makes the bald faced claim that they are all second century or later.

You need to make specific claims and arguments for why these books support claims. I have already pointed out that the dates are not actual dates of the documents we hold. They are assumed dates for the originals which we don't have. If you want to debate these books, you need to start with one and claim why it supports Jesus' existence. Just because a book was written or letter doesn't mean diddly for the argument with out reasons why.

Not only is his 'evidence' nothing more than plagurized Wells, a fully discredited source, but his statement are provably factually wrong.

Who has quoted from Wells? Please provide the exact quote and post number. Ill wait while you find nothing.

Indeed, here is what scholars have to say:

"Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely.... The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question."

"Even the famously liberal Professor Bultmann, who argued against the historicity of much of the gospels, questions the reasonableness of Jesus Mythers themselves in Jesus and the Word."

"Given the broad consensus against the Jesus Myth, it has been left to a few non-professional commentators, such as Earl Doherty and GA Wells to question Jesus' existence. Despite their vigorous efforts, they have failed, and continue to fail, to even give their position respectability in the broader academic community."

http://bede.org.uk/price1.htm

Do you know who Cristopher Price is. He is the author of your article! Here is a rebuttal to your article and everything Price claims:

http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/CritiquesRefut1.htm

It is three parts and pages with a full rebuttal of

From my rebuttal link
Page 1
For Price to find Case’s arguments “convincing� shows that he too is operating under the same prejudgment and refusal to properly evaluate evidence.

Page 3
While it is true that older mythicists were guilty of “radically late dating of the canonical Gospels� (so Price), this is generally not true today. 15 or 20 years later than the preferred date of 70 for Mark is hardly risible, and Van Voorst’s use of “probably� indicates that scholarship lacks its own sufficient basis to lock any of the Gospels into a firm and narrow date range.

On Tacitus and Josephus
Van Voorst and others seem to be presupposing an era of communication like our own, widespread and available libraries and archives, a rational and educated populace able to differentiate fact from fiction, memory from wishful thinking, religious truth from scientific and historical truth. Detractors in this vein go so far as to demand that Celsus—a century and a half after the reputed Jesus—should have availed himself of the argument that Jesus never existed. On what grounds, through what exegetical means and abilities, Celsus could possibly have uncovered the fundamental falsity of what Christians had claimed and written about their origin, is never explained. Even a cursory consideration of this whole argument ought to reveal its obvious illusory basis, yet from Goguel to Van Voorst it is regularly parotted as historicity’s Second Law.

Price, too, repeats the same mantra, equally oblivious to the realities of the situation and the limitations of ancient times. He calls Van Voorst’s argument “one of the least discussed but most obvious flaws in the Jesus Myth,� ignoring or ignorant of the many times a response of this nature has been made, including on Internet discussion boards he has been a part of. He also refers to “the absence of internal Christian conflict on this issue,� overlooking the very texts of 1 John and Ignatius which point to that very thing. The dramatic conflict between Gnostic and orthodox expression of the faith (according to which some like to interpret those texts), which began in the early 2 nd century, is also a telling indicator. It can be no coincidence that docetic and separationist views of Jesus arose at that time, whereas they had not troubled the Christian mind in the 80 years previous. The concern about whether a god could partake of full humanity is not likely to have arisen until a new trend of the faith developed which claimed that the spiritual Christ had actually been a human man on earth. The otherwise unexplainable lack of conflict over such a matter during almost a century was arguably because no such idea had as yet appeared. (Any Gospel in existence before that time would not have been regarded as history, and would have enjoyed very limited dissemination, as the record shows.)


This is only one example of how the simplistic views and arguments of Price and Van Voorst show no cognizance of the subtlety and complexity of much of the mythicist case, locked as they are into old paradigms and an inflexible adamance against considering any others.

“Fifth, Wells and his predecessors have been far too skeptical about the value of non-Christian witnesses to Jesus, especially Tacitus and Josephus. They point to well-known text-critical and source-critical problems in these witnesses and argue that these problems rule out the entire value of these passages, ignoring the strong consensus that most of these passages are basically trustworthy.�

Not only is this the height of naivete (and contradicts some of what Van Voorst himself will conclude in his study of them), it ignores the fact that the reliability of these alleged witnesses to Jesus has been debated for over a century with no resolution that can be backed up with demonstrable proof, and that includes within the anti-mythicist camp. (We have seen above how several scholars virtually dismiss them as having any value whatsoever.) Even if one did have a “strong consensus� does not provide that demonstration, since this ‘basic trust’ is an expression of opinion and preference. This is shown by Van Voorst’s own words above: if there are indeed multiple “text-critical and source-critical problems� in all these documents, on what secure basis in the texts themselves is the “trustworthy� judgment based? Nothing can be demonstrated about Josephus to confirm such a judgment; we simply have sets of contrary arguments with no way of knowing which side can be relied on. (My own aim has been nothing more than to demonstrate the unreliability of these reputed references, so as to set them aside.)

Page 3 Tacitus
Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion to draw from all this is that Tacitus knew only the designation “Christ� and mistook it for the name of the founder. What might that tell us about the source? In discussing the source question, Van Voorst rules out any written Christian source, or even an oral source of Gospel traditions. While the popular apologetic argument is that he consulted some Roman archive, Van Voorst is skeptical, since imperial archives were closed and secret, while the more accessible senatorial archives were not likely to contain such a record. He even allows that Tacitus’ use of the anachronistic “Procurator� for Pilate (in the latter’s time the term was “Prefect�) “may indicate that he is not using an official imperial or senatorial document, which would not likely have made such a mistake� [p.50]. A different type of historical record now lost is possible, but, Van Voorst admits, purely speculative.

In view of the situation, the most sensible explanation is that Tacitus got his information from Christians, who would have used the term “Christ� to refer to their founder, either because that was the designation used by the Christ cult for at least the better part of a century, or because any human Jesus would by this time have been sufficiently elevated to be referred to by the more exalted “Christ.�

The whole article is a really good read if you care to read the rest.

I think Nicjman is providing a wonderful demonstration on the accuracy of the NT Scholars assessment of the Jesus Myth.

What do you think?

I think you look at the Jesus Myth with contempt and don't look at all the scholarly opinion on the subject because it would devastate your beliefs.

See above? Thats how to source a link and provide quotes. It also goes into the gospels and almost every aspect of Jesus, addressing in detail. Ill post more from the link in refutation to your claims after I eat my lunch.

[EduChris]

...Should we not hold those organizations that spread deliberate lies accountable for their actions? Should we not demonstrate just how barren of intelligence the claim is? And ask those who believed in such nonsense to return to the sources where they garnered such deliberate miseducation and they themselves ask why they were so badly miseducated?

If they reject the overwhelming consensus of actual scholars in the field, and if they have no new evidence or arguments to support their claims, then what makes you think they will listen to anything you say?

From time to time it may be well to rehearse the evidence in favor of the overwhelming scholarly consensus. From time to time it may be well to ask the mythologist to produce new evidence or arguments against the overwhelming scholarly consensus. But it appears that these things have already been done on this thread. If the mythologist continues to believe his or her mythology even after all this, then what further need is there to treat that person as anything more than the near intellectual kin of a flat earther?

[Nickman]

By all means Nickam, instead of claiming that you 'previously addressed it' . prove it.

If you are going to quote rules, you had best make sure you are following them.

Particularly when you tell a person who is providing you with a book, a list of THOUSANDS OF LINKS, and direct links to lists of the very documents you claim don't exist ...

Well, we should take your claims as fact because you say so?

You quoted the rules, now pony up.

And it is exactly these kinds of antics that lead me to question the validity of your position entirely.

Im not in any violation of rules. It is not my duty to provide you with a link to the same thread we are on. Your list of a thousand links presents no argument at all. I don't claim those books and letters don't exist. I claim they need to be looked at individually to gain context and dispute each one at a time. It's your link so, by all means, provide evidence within the link that supports your arguments.

[Nickman]

From my link

Sources of the Canonical Gospels

Of course, Van Voorst is right on one thing. The demand for evidence one way or another must fall onto the New Testament itself, along with the rest of the Christian record. That is where the essence of the mythicist case lies—or ought to. The rest is little more than a supporting cast. I will briefly comment on the balance of Van Voorst’s book.

He examines the “Special Material� of both Luke and Matthew, noting that no scholarly consensus has been established as to whether this material is derived from external sources or was simply the invention of the respective evangelists. Moreover, he says, “as with Luke, it is difficult to distinguish between (Matthew’s) source material and the evangelist’s own redaction. The theological orientation of much of M is very close, if not identical, to the religious outlook of the author of Matthew� [p.148]. While he rules out Matthew’s special material as “witness to the historical Jesus,� he leans in that direction for Luke’s, even though there is hardly a stronger case for this than in Matthew. He also has to deal with the same problem found in Q: that this external source for Jesus says nothing about a death and resurrection.

Though there is more indication with the “Signs Source� postulated behind some of John’s Gospel that it could have been a written source, there is no consensus on whether it contained a passion and resurrection narrative. If it did not, then a story of miracle performance with no teaching (and miracles which largely do not appear in the Synoptics) is more difficult to confidently derive from a response to the career of the historical Jesus envisioned by any of the Gospels. As with Q, we have to wonder why and how any community would have chosen to preserve one narrow aspect of Jesus’ ministry to the exclusion of all else. It is suggested that this document of miracles could have been put together to convince a Jewish audience that Jesus was the Messiah, since the latter’s appearance was supposed to be heralded by miracles. But this may actually provide a clue to the collection’s origins: namely, that it began as a record of a community’s claimed miracles to corroborate their preaching that the Kingdom was at hand, with no particular figure accorded their performance. Any failure of this Signs Source to contain a resurrection account would be an indicator as well, for how could such a record of miracles not include a rising from the dead? In any case, it all shows how uncertain and unreliable are the claims that source material within the Gospels bears witness to an historical Jesus.

[Mithrae]

From what I know it's probably true that Acts (mis)used Josephus as a source, and obviously Josephus mentioned both of those people. Those are the only two sources of information regarding them which Wikipedia mentions. Josephus was born over 30 years after Judas of Galilee led his revolt, and was only 8 or 9 when Theudas died. Obviously anything he wrote about them was merely hearsay. So which contemporary sources are you talking about?

Josephus was the contemporary I spoke of. He may not have been alive during Judas of Galilee but he was during Theudas. He was close enough to both and wrote about both. Jesus would have been within a few years of his life and the whole christian movement he left behind would have been just as, if not more popular. We see nothing. John the Baptist seems to make it in the text, yet Jesus the most popular man of all time doesn't. I say most popular because I am using the gospels. I know they could be embellished and I agree they most likely were, but just going off of what we have he was very popular. He did so many things and had thousands of followers flocking from abroad. Judas of Galilee and Theudas had how many followers?

Probably thousands in the case of Judas of Galilee - according to Wikipedia the whole zealot movement is traced by Josephus back to his revolt against taxation. But apparently not a peep was said about him by Philo, Seneca or Pliny the Elder So we can conclude that your argument from silence is a bad argument, even if we take the absurd position that the gospels' miracles and great numbers are a reliable basis for historical consideration. (And you are being even more absurd, calling him "the most popular man of all time," which the gospels do not suggest.) The 1st century population of Jerusalem is estimated at some 600,000, the whole of Judea and Galilee obviously even moreso. The largest crowd ever mentioned in the gospels or Acts is less than 1% of that.

"Such-and-such didn't mention this" is nothing more than an observation of trivia, unless you have first shown that such-and-such should have mentioned this; but obviously as far as we can infer by comparison, those people had no reason to mention every semi-famous or notorious Jew who popped up over the decades. Josephus, of course, was apparently a fairly thorough historian and does mention Judas of Galilee, and Theudas, and John the Baptist, and Jesus who was called Christ.

By whom was the First Apocalypse of James written? Is it even 'hearsay,' or is it much, much later stories? Why do you consider it a source worth discussing?

Im just showing that there are even more stories about James which are Christian. James is not considered Jesus' brother.

You're dredging up an obviously, blatantly unreliable source as a counter-point to discussion of Paul's first-hand information regarding James. This is an exceptionally bad style of argument.

Paul wrote to the Galatian church:
"Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins. . . .
...after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother."

Isnt Paul's words stating "the lord's brother" hearsay as well? Who told him? Nothing is written by James. Nothing is written by Peter either to confirm this. Peters letters are of unknown authorship. How do we know what was written in the gospels about James is correct? Do we have anything to verify Paul's story?

To the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 9) he wrote:
"Do we have no right to eat and drink? Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?"
On both occasions Paul specifically distinguishes people as brothers of Jesus, unlike Peter or the apostles. Catholic apologetics aside, please provide your evidence that when Paul says 'brother' he does not mean brother.

Why is James nothing in the gospels? He has no influence other than total opposition. He is vaguely passed by in all of the gospels, yet in Acts he is the head of the Jerusalem church. We have nothing concrete about this figure James either. John never mentions James at all as being Jesus' brother, yet he later becomes the head of the church? The stories do not jive, and in a court of law would be thrown out.

You have not provided any credible evidence supporting your suggestion that when Paul says 'brother' he does not mean brother. This bait-and-switch approach is another bad kind of debating technique.

As you've mentioned, the gospels confirm that Jesus did indeed have brothers who were not his followers (by Peter's interpretor in Mark 6:1-5, and by Jesus' disciple in John 7:1-10). Paul relates a tradition that James converted after Jesus' alleged resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). Reading Acts we see from the beginning the circle of 12 disciples and the prominence of Peter (who is imprisoned by Herod), John and James of Zebedee (who is executed by Herod); but by the time of the council in chapter 15, perhaps 15-20 years after Jesus' death, we see that it's James who makes the final decision regarding Gentile converts. James' gradual rise to pre-eminence within the movement which Acts suggests is hard to explain unless he was indeed Jesus' oldest brother and thus, in a manner, the 'heir' to his leadership. How else would the prominence of Peter and John be overshadowed? Thus the gospels, and especially Acts, converge quite neatly with Paul's first-hand knowledge.

Your source that "Ananus was against the Zealots" when he was high priest?

Here and here

The zealot temple seige occurred years after the killing of James the brother of Jesus. It has no relevance to our discussion of that passage. This is a very bad argument.

You haven't provided any reason to suppose that scholars' views are wrong, and that the high priest had decided to kill members of other priestly families without Josephus bothering to explain why.

Your failing to realize that Josephus parallels the story in both his works, Antiquities and Wars. We see nothing of this James brother of Jesus in the Wars text, which goes even more in depth on Ananus.

If the incident was as significant as you claim it was - a high priest killing the member of another priestly family and "some others," and indeed the whole reason why Jesus ben Damneus got the job! - that's very strange indeed. Why do you think Josephus didn't mention it in Jewish War? Intelligent discussion does not follow the format "Here's a discrepancy, therefore my conclusion is correct," especially when that alleged discrepancy is problematic to your view more than the other fellow's.

Tacitus was not a Christian. He didn't like the Christians. So the source we have here is a credible non-Christian historian who was a Roman senator in the late 1st century.

He may have been a credible historian but all he had were Christian sources. So are many historians through the centuries, yet they also used the only sources they had. Can you show any sources he could have drawn from other than Christian ones? There are none. That is the whole point of my argument. Hegessipus is in the same boat.

There's at least one very obvious possible source, which I had already mentioned to Student: Josephus is a non-Christian source who mentioned Jesus (the one called Christ) and was in Rome while Tacitus was a senator there. You're trying to make an argument from ignorance here; we can't confirm what other source Tacitus might have used, so we should presume that it was Christian information.

[Mithrae]

Presumably he would have known of those changes under Claudius, period. But writing some 70 years later, the title 'procurator' would likely have meant more to his readers than the title 'prefect.' In fact writing a mere three decades after Claudius' reign Josephus also calls Pilate a procurator:
"Now Pilate, who was sent as procurator into Judea by Tiberius, sent by night those images of Caesar that are called ensigns into Jerusalem." (Jewish War 2.9.2)
Are we to suppose that Josephus also was hoodwinked, or merely that he was writing for his own period?

We don't know where Tacitus got his information from or how thoroughly he checked its accuracy. What we do know is firstly that he was a credible historian, and secondly that he viewed the Christian sect with hostility or contempt. So we have good reason to be suspicious of any suggestion that he'd simply take them at their word regarding their founder. Perhaps there were earlier written sources now lost to us; perhaps at some point he'd spoken with officials who'd served in Judea, or with respected Jewish sources. We do not know. But those who suggest that a credible late 1st/early 2nd century non-Christian historian should be simply waved away as parroting the claims of a sect he manifestly disliked carry about as much weight to my mind - pending some actual evidence, of course - as those who imagine him combing through musty vaults of official records to ascertain the facts.

Claudius did not dispense with the rank of prefect throughout the Roman Empire - procurators simply replaced prefects in Judaea. So Tacitus’ audience would have been perfectly well aware of what the rank of prefect entailed. Therefore there was no reason for Tacitus to condescend to the ignorance of his audience.

And why would Tacitus bother to ascertain anything more about these contemptible Christians other than what they so foolishly claimed of themselves. After all it was hardly worthy of merit to claim that your leader had been crucified – a punishment reserved for the lowest of the low, slaves, criminals and the scum of society. So there was no good reason other than for Tacitus to simply take them at their word to show how worthy of contempt they were.

As for Josephus, it is a falsehood to state ‘as fact’ that he wrote that Pilate’s title was procurator. Josephus wrote in Greek and used the generic term �πίτ�οπος (epitropos) which literally means steward, trustee, administrator.

That the term �πίτ�οπος (epitropos) was a generic term for ‘governor’ is evidenced by Philo who used the term for the governors of Egypt (a prefect), of Asia (a proconsul) and Syria (a legate).

Prior the discovery of the Pilate stone in 1961 it was assumed, thanks to Tacitus, that Pilate was a procurator. When Whiston translated AJ into English he followed Tacitus and applied the title, erroneously, to Pilate.

All good points, and I stand corrected. Should've checked Wikipedia first

So the questions we have are A> Did Tacitus know that the Roman governors of Judea before 44CE were prefects and B> Did he care? 70 years after that time, was it an important distinction?

I think we can safely infer, as implied earlier and as you've agreed, that he didn't delve into any vault of official records; not just because of Pilate's title, but moreso because 'Christus' is used as Jesus' personal name, and indeed because a non-citizen from Galilee may not have appeared in any official records - and surely not outside of Judea/Syria - in the first place.

You make a good point that reference to Jesus' crucifixion would merely be a further slur on Christianity - but it would still be rather a rather sloppy approach to some historical trivia involving a Roman official. Like I say, he might have merely repeated Christians' claims. Largely for that reason I'd say that his comments stand well behind Paul, Josephus and the gospels in terms of historical value regarding Jesus. But I don't think we have sufficient reason to dismiss their usefulness entirely; I don't think we can say with any high probability that Tacitus was simply repeating their claims.

It's an interesting observation, but if you're suggesting that its use in Antiquities 20 is out of place, it seems that's a question which you'll need to answer. My point is that it's obvious why he would identify Jesus as "the one called Christ," if that's who he was talking about; at least some of his readers would likely understand the reference to Christians, even if there had been no such hint in an untampered original of the TF. So if we're going to speculate that it's out of place, we must first explain why Josephus did not use the term 'Christ' of David, Cyrus and Vespasian to see whether those same reasons should have excluded its use of Jesus also.

He had an obvious reason to identify this Jesus as the one called Christ. What do you propose as the reason he should not have done so?

Josephus had one very obvious reason not to refer to Jesus as the Messiah; he [Josephus] considered Vespasian to be the messiah and wrote Antiquities while under the patronage of the Emperor. He was hardly likely to jeopardise his standing with the Roman court by referring to some Jewish upstart as an alternative messiah.

Furthermore, Josephus considered Jewish apocalyptic messianic movements to have been the root cause of the destruction of Jerusalem. Consequently, when he writes of these popular uprisings [as he does on several occasions] he makes no reference to a messiah, or to their attendant messianic fervour. Instead he refers to these disturbances using the pejorative term ‘madness’ and to their leaders as brigands.

Consequently, while Josephus may have mentioned Jesus he is unlikely to have referred to him “the one called the Christ/Messiah� especially so if this messianic claimant had a significant popular following.
I believe therefore that the simplest explanation is that, rather than draw attention to the existence of alternative messiahs, Josephus did not use the term ‘Christ’ at all.

But as you've pointed out, he didn't actually call Vespasian Christ, nor explain that as a term which could describe Jewish apocalyptic uprisings. As far as the extant text of Josephus is concerned, the term Christ is associated only with Christians. Associating that term with Vespasian or with Jewish movements requires reading something more into the text. Josephus himself obviously would have known that 'Christ' applies to those movements, to the Jewish priests and kings, and to his portrayal of Vespasian - but he chose not to convey that to his audience.

So unless we presume on their part some knowledge of Jewish culture and translated terminology beyond what Josephus is giving them, we have reason to suppose only that they'd understand 'Christ' as reference to Christians - whether from general knowledge of Nero's persecution, or from a hypothetical unaltered original TF (or both).

In short, as far as we can tell, describing Jesus as the one called Christ would not have drawn attention either to Jewish movements or to Vespasian.