Josephus on Jesus and James

[historia]

All of the extant manuscripts of Josephus' Antiquity of the Jews contain the following references to Jesus of Nazareth. Did Josephus write this text, or are these reference entirely Christian interpolations?

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus . . . he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned . . .

[historia]

This doesn't seem to address my point. My point is that once its been established that a part of the text has been tampered with then our attitude toward the rest of the text must change. We can no longer look neutrally upon the text. Instead we must now assume other parts may also have been tampered with unless we can demonstrate otherwise.

I understand what you're saying, and I don't think we disagree. I wouldn't have spent a dozen posts in this thread arguing in favor of partial interpolation if I thought the burden of proof lay entirely with those who believe in full interpolation. I've done my part to "demonstrate otherwise" -- whether that has been successful or not, I leave to you.

This is quite different from your perspective. You seem to believe that if part of a text is tampered with then we should assume its an isolated event that is irrelevant to other parts of the text. That we shouldn't change our attitude toward the rest of the text in light of such a discovery unless we can prove other parts were tampered with.

I think perhaps you've gone too abstract for me here. I don't recognize my own position in your summary. And, at any rate, I'm not sure I can carry on a meaningful philosophical discussion about our "attitude toward a text" apart from the actual issues here.

I would point out, for example, that we often see glosses interpolated into the main of a text in ancient and Medieval manuscripts -- it's just the nature of copying things by hand. And, when comparing these minor changes to other manuscripts, we see that such changes are often, in fact, isolated.

We should not simply assume that that is the case here with the Testimonium, of course. Again, I've put forward arguments -- including citing expert opinion -- to support that conclusion. At no point here am I arguing from a purely philosophical position.

My argument about motive here is to show that, in so far as we cannot find a convincing context or reason for someone to have produced a complete forgery, that fact (to some extent, anyway) weakens the argument for a full interpolation. Or, at least, it's not as strong as it could be. And, in so far as the goal of the thread is to show which hypothesis best accounts for the available data, weakening a rival hypothesis strengthens my overall position.

[Mithrae]

This is certainly a strong point, and one that any hypothesis of partial interpolation needs to address.

But arguments from silence are tricky. In this case, I would suggest it is only compelling if two things are true: (1) early Christian authors knew of this particular passage in Josephus, and (b) they felt that citing it would be useful in their polemics.

The first point is well covered by Alice Whealey in Josephus on Jesus (2003), in which she examines every ancient and Medieval Christian who cited Josephus. Allow me to quote at length from her work (pgs. 11-12). We'll deal with Origen himself separately.

. . . .

These observations are relevant to early modern and modern arguments about the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum. Patristic silence about the Testimonium before Origen if not Eusebius has been cited both in the early modern and modern period as evidence that the text is entirely an interpolation. Yet before Origen no Christian writer apparently found it worthwhile to cite Josephus as a relevant authority on anything in the New Testament; not only did they not cite Josephus on Jesus, they did not cite Josephus on James the brother of Jesus, John the Baptist, the several parallels shared by Luke-Acts and Josephus' works, and perhaps most surprisingly, they did not even name Josephus as an authority on King Herod, a figure who dominates three and a half books of Antiquities. Probably the reason for this is Christians' relative inattention to their own history during the second and third centuries. As far as we know, there were no real histories of the church in the period after Acts (circa 85 AD) and before Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica (circa 320 AD).

In other words, it appears that early Christian writers were not as well acquainted with Antiquities as some have presumed. They cited Josephus as an authority on issues relating to Jewish history and the Old Testament, not the period covering Christian history.

Origen, though, certainly knew Antiquities, even citing book 18 in his works. Why does he not quote from the Testimonium then? Here our reconstruction of the original text is useful. If the reconstructed text is accurate, then the original text was short and rather neutral (even somewhat negative) toward Jesus.

Most pagan and Jewish attacks on Jesus tended to be slanderous: he was the illegitimate child of an adulterous woman, he deceived people, his miracles were the result of magic, etc. The original, un-interpolated text of the Testimonium provides little material that could be cited against such attacks: at best, it says that Jesus was "wise" and a doer of "paradoxical" (Greek: paradoxos) works. Christians would have had little reason, then, to cite Josephus on this point.

Good points, and having looked into it further it seems that two of Origen's references to Josephus are quite general and two others are more or less comments in passing, and would not lead us to expect anything further from him.

In his Commentary on Mattew Origen is writing about Jesus' relationship to Joseph and Mary, Mary's supposed perpetual virginity and consequently Jesus' relationship to James and his other brothers Joseph, Simon and Jude. Josephus' reference to James is mentioned alongside comments in the Gospel of Peter, the Protoevangelium of James, Galatians and Jude, whereas "With regard to Joseph and Simon we have nothing to tell."

In Against Celsus 2.13 Origen is writing about Jesus' predictions of the future; of his own death, of the continuation and persecution of his followers, and of Jerusalem's seige and conquest. Josephus is called upon as an obvious witness regarding the latter, but there's no reason to suppose that he should have made any further reference to Josephus' hypothetical comments on Jesus here.

But in Against Celsus 1.47 Origen mentions Josephus' comments about John the Baptist in Antiquities 18, being "one who lived no great length of time after John and Jesus." He then skips to Josephus' comments about James for the specific purpose of correcting what he thought he wrote, and saying that Jerusalem's destruction was on account of Jesus rather than of James. I think it's reasonable to suppose that in a passage where he both references Josephus' comments on John, and corrects Josephus' (alleged) comments on James, Origen surely would have mentioned Josephus' direct comments on Jesus if he knew of them, if only in order to correct them.

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The Josephus passage is very short however (especially once we've removed the bits we want to remove), so I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about why the claim "The language and style is Josephan" has any merit

As usual, a very perceptive observation, Mithrae. Let me first acknowledge the limits of these studies by way of a quote from Carleton Paget, whose article is cited above (from page 576):

In the end, a decision in favour of or against the genuineness of the passage on the basis of its style and language is always going to be tenuous, not least because, as we noted above, the passage is so short, and may possibly reflect the use of a source.

That being said, what Meier has done is basically look at the terms and phrases used in the Testimonium and compared them to the frequency of those terms in the New Testament.

Here we face a basic methodological problem. Since we do not know who the Christian interpolator(s) were, or whether indeed the interpolations are anything more than random marginal notes that entered the text at different times, it is impossible to compare Josephus* vocabulary and style with any one Christian author. The NT is chosen for the sake of providing some fixed point of contrast; it is one corpus of first-century Christian works, most of which were written within the span of five decades, just as Josephus supplies us with a corpus of first-century Jewish works, all written within the span of three decades. The choice of the NT is not totally arbitrary, since presumably a Christian theologian or scribe of the first few centuries would be steeped in NT thought and vocabulary and would naturally narrate the story of Jesus out of his NT background.

I included an example of that analysis above in response to Goat: the Testamonium uses a term here for Gentiles that is used regularly throughout Josephus' writings, but it only used once in the NT.

Meier looks at more than just the frequency of terms. The Testamonium uses some words in a difference sense from how they are used in the NT. It also includes some (rather) unique phrases that Josephus uses elsewhere in Antiquities, as in this example from 8.1.1:

Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty . . . so men received what they said with pleasure, and this bold attempt proceeded to a great height.

Here is Meier's summary:

The upshot of all this is that, apart from Christianon, not one word of what I identify as the original text of the Testimonium fails to occur elsewhere in Josephus, usually with the same meaning and/or construction. As indicated in the first part of this note, the same cannot be said of the NT. One final caution: Word statistics are used here simply to indicate whether a word occurs fairly frequently either in Josephus or in the NT. The statistics should not be used simplistically to contrast the two bodies of material taken as a whole. Josephus represents a larger corpus of works than does the NT, and he is one well-known author as opposed to numerous NT authors, many of whom are anonymous.

Did that answer your question? I'm far from an expert on this as well, so I'm not sure I've done it justice here.

Two thoughts occurred to me while reading this the other day: Firstly that while Meier correctly says that "we do not know who the Christian interpolator(s) were," we should surely consider comparison with Eusebius' work (as well as the NT) to see if that well-known hypothesis has any merit. Secondly that the phrase from Antiquites 8 "men received what they said with pleasure" is certainly a strong point of similarity with a reconstructed TF.

But I've just now read the article by Ken Olson which Goat earlier mentioned, and to my mind it does indeed make quite a good case that the TF fits well into Eusebius' agenda and vocabulary. He even mentions that the earlier of Eusebius' references to the TF does not have that phrase "receive with pleasure" - rather it speaks of "men who revere the truth" - so that particular similarity to Josephus' work might (dubiously) be considered a revision into more Josephan style by Eusebius himself.

In fact two of your main arguments are also somewhat addressed in the article - both of those features of the TF supposedly being consistent with Eusebius' work.

• 3. The claim that Jesus had many non-Jewish followers contradicts the New Testament.
  4. The author's apparent surprise that Jesus' followers continue to persist after his death has a dismissive tone.

Apparently Eusebius does specifically say that Jesus' miracles were shown to both Jews and Greeks, and several times presents Christianity as being somewhere between Jewish and Greek thought. He also challenges venerators of Apollonius of Tyana to show any notable effects of his efforts which had lasted "to this day," for which the TF he cites offers an obvious answer. I can't speak for the accuracy of Olson's claims there of course, but having been published in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (K. A. Olson, “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,� Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61.2 (1999) 305-322) I would guess that they're probably true.

---------------

The final point I would make is that this position is held by most scholars, including many Jewish scholars and experts on Josephus. Not only do they find many of the above points convincing, but, having studied numerous manuscripts in the course of their research, conclude that this simply doesn't look like a forgery. Rather, it has the hallmarks of a gloss, as our hypothesis states.

From Carleton Paget (2001), "Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity," Journal of Theological Studies vol. 52 part 2, pg. 576:

Would a forger, intent upon aping Josephan style and at the same time avoiding biblical-sounding language, have produced such a Christian-sounding sentence? Does it not have more of the quality of a gloss of an already existing passage, an observation which is perhaps encouraged by the asyndetic character of the phrase?

From Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? (2012), pg 64-65:

If a scribe (or Eusebius or anyone else) wanted to insert a strong testimony about the virtues of Jesus into the writings of Josephus (so the Testimonium is a later interpolation), he surely would have done so in a much more glowing and obvious way. Those who wrote apocryphal stories about Jesus are flamboyant both in what they relate (recounting lots of Jesus' miracles, for example) and in how they say it (stressing his divine nature, not simply that he was the messiah). The Testimonium is so restrained, with only a couple of fairly reserved sentences here and there, that it does not read like a Christian apocryphal account of Jesus written for the occasion. It reads much more like what you get elsewhere throughout the manuscript tradition of ancient writings: a touch-up job that ascribe could easily do.

These two scholars both say that it looks like a gloss, but for precisely opposite reasons: Paget thinks that a Christian forger would not have produced such a blatantly Christian-sounding passage, while Ehrman thinks that a Christian forger would have written much more glowing and obvious praise of Jesus. If these two scholars can read the passage and speculate on scribes' motivations so very differently, how sound could their conclusion possibly be?

I agree to some extent with Paget's reasoning rather than Ehrman's - it's essentially one of the two points I initially suggested favouring partial authenticity - but based on the extreme contrast of these two examples you've offered, it seems to me that the views of scholars on this point hold no more weight than our own opinions.

5. The fact that Jesus is mentioned before John the Baptist, the reverse order of the Gospels.

This is a very good point I think. If they were free to place it anywhere it seems very unlikely that any Christian could fail to have John preceding Jesus.



So for now I remain unpersuaded by either view; there's good arguments suggesting that it may not have existed in Origen's copy of Josephus and may have been invented by Eusebius himself, but there's also some good points which pose a problem for wholesale forgery.

Out of interest, what is your opinion on the Arabic version of the passage? Do you think it offers some evidence of an untampered original? Would its differences from the Greek text/s affect your reconstruction?

[scourge99]

This doesn't seem to address my point. My point is that once its been established that a part of the text has been tampered with then our attitude toward the rest of the text must change. We can no longer look neutrally upon the text. Instead we must now assume other parts may also have been tampered with unless we can demonstrate otherwise.

I understand what you're saying, and I don't think we disagree. I wouldn't have spent a dozen posts in this thread arguing in favor of partial interpolation if I thought the burden of proof lay entirely with those who believe in full interpolation. I've done my part to "demonstrate otherwise" -- whether that has been successful or not, I leave to you.

If its true that we agree that there is a burden of proof required to establish the authenticity of the documents claims then I find it odd that you were so adamant in demanding that evidence must be offered to demonstrate intentional forgery. Such seems like a red-herring when you said: I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I agree that if someone is going to make a positive claim of intentional forgery then they need to back that up. But that is a just distraction from the point. Whether or not intentional forgery can be substantiated is irrelevant to proving the texts authenticity once its established that particular sections have been corrupted.

This is quite different from your perspective. You seem to believe that if part of a text is tampered with then we should assume its an isolated event that is irrelevant to other parts of the text. That we shouldn't change our attitude toward the rest of the text in light of such a discovery unless we can prove other parts were tampered with.

I think perhaps you've gone too abstract for me here. I don't recognize my own position in your summary. And, at any rate, I'm not sure I can carry on a meaningful philosophical discussion about our "attitude toward a text" apart from the actual issues here.

I wouldn't call it philosophical other then it employs some basic logic and critical thinking but its certainly a discussion at a larger scope. A discussion of best practices and principles you might say so we can start from some common ground. Doing so is quite important because, for one thing, it keeps us from unintentional errors like confirmation bias and special pleading when looking at the details of particular case like this one.

It seems to me there was nothing controversial about what I said so I find it strange that you declined to directly address what I said and hand-waved it away as "philosophical".

I would point out, for example, that we often see glosses interpolated into the main of a text in ancient and Medieval manuscripts -- it's just the nature of copying things by hand. And, when comparing these minor changes to other manuscripts, we see that such changes are often, in fact, isolated.

OK and I agree. But that is not here or there in regards to my points.

My points over the last few posts being:
1) speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it.
2) Given that its been established that the document is corrupted to some extent in the parts referring to Jesus, we must be doubtful of their authenticity unless strong reason/evidence move us to disregard this corruption. (Yes, i understand you are making other points in this thread to support its authenticity)
3) Given that a document is corrupted to some extent, it does not help substantiate the documents authenticity by pointing out that there are no arguments/evidence to explain how the corruption occurred.

We should not simply assume that that is the case here with the Testimonium, of course. Again, I've put forward arguments -- including citing expert opinion -- to support that conclusion. At no point here am I arguing from a purely philosophical position.

I agree.

My argument about motive here is to show that, in so far as we cannot find a convincing context or reason for someone to have produced a complete forgery, that fact (to some extent, anyway) weakens the argument for a full interpolation. Or, at least, it's not as strong as it could be. And, in so far as the goal of the thread is to show which hypothesis best accounts for the available data, weakening a rival hypothesis strengthens my overall position.

Two problems:
1) Showing a weakness in a hypothesis does not strengthen another hypothesis unless the two hypotheses exhaust all possible hypotheses for the situation (which they don't). In other words, showing a weakness in a hypothesis only strengthens the NULL HYPOTHESIS. Hypotheses stand on their own merit.

2) This is a violation of one of the principles I mentioned before. The principle was that speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it. Yet you argue:
a) we cannot think of any convincing motivation or context for a complete forgery.
b) therefore the argument that the text is a complete forgery is weakened.
c) therefore the argument that the text is authentic is bolstered.

This seems to leave us with 4 options for you:
i) you disagree with the principle i mentioned.
ii) you disagree with my understanding of the principle.
iii) you believe this is an exception to the principle.
iv) you made a mistake.

[Student]

The fifth argument I would offer is the placement of the Testimonium in relationship to the text on John the Baptist.

Contrary to Gospels, which always depict John the Baptist as a forerunner to Jesus, Josephus mentions Jesus here in Antiquities 18 before his account of John. Likewise, the section on John is considerably longer than the section on Jesus, and nowhere are the two related to each other.

Had a Christian scribe invented the Testimonium from scratch, and was therefore free to place it anywhere in Josephus' works, would we not expect him to place it after the reference to John? Would we not expect Jesus to get at least equal treatment to John? Maybe even point out some connection between the two?

I do not think that we should attach much weight to this particular line of reasoning.

In Josephus’ account, Pilate’s activities are recorded from 18.3.1, (including the death of Jesus at 18.3.3) to his eventual recall to Rome at 18.4.2. The execution of John is mentioned 18.5.2. However, Josephus does not report exactly when John died, just that Herod Antipas had him executed some time before his [Herod’s] army was defeated by Aretas. Josephus records that some Jews considered this defeat to be divine retribution for the execution of John which is why he includes the account of John’s death at this juncture.
There is no indication as to exactly when John’s execution is supposed to have happened so it is impossible, using AJ, to determine a relative chronology for the respective executions of Jesus and John.

Consequently, placing the account of Jesus death within the events that occurred during Pilate’s period of office, does not indicate that the author considered this specific event to have occurred prior to that of John’s execution, simply that it happened whilst Pilate was in office.

Conversely, placing the account of Jesus’ execution anywhere after the account of John’s would be much more difficult. It would require some pretext to provide a context to justify its inclusion as well as additional information to indicate that it had occurred under the jurisdiction of Pilate.

Therefore, it is much simpler for the account to be placed somewhere within the account of Pilate’s tenure, as it is in the TR. As there is nothing to contradict the Christian tradition it does not preclude the possibility that it is a Christian interpolation.

As for the shortness of the account, and the lack of cross references to the death of John, this also does not reduce the possibility of interpolation.

Unless the scribe was transcribing the whole work e.g. all of book 18, he would be hard pressed to create sufficient space for a more lengthy account. Normally he would be limited to the space available either in the margins or between the lines of text in the manuscript before him.

Under these circumstances we would expect a relatively short interpolation.

[Student]

The Josephus passage is very short however (especially once we've removed the bits we want to remove), so I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about why the claim "The language and style is Josephan" has any merit

As usual, a very perceptive observation, Mithrae. Let me first acknowledge the limits of these studies by way of a quote from Carleton Paget, whose article is cited above (from page 576):

In the end, a decision in favour of or against the genuineness of the passage on the basis of its style and language is always going to be tenuous, not least because, as we noted above, the passage is so short, and may possibly reflect the use of a source.

That being said, what Meier has done is basically look at the terms and phrases used in the Testimonium and compared them to the frequency of those terms in the New Testament.

Here we face a basic methodological problem. Since we do not know who the Christian interpolator(s) were, or whether indeed the interpolations are anything more than random marginal notes that entered the text at different times, it is impossible to compare Josephus* vocabulary and style with any one Christian author. The NT is chosen for the sake of providing some fixed point of contrast; it is one corpus of first-century Christian works, most of which were written within the span of five decades, just as Josephus supplies us with a corpus of first-century Jewish works, all written within the span of three decades. The choice of the NT is not totally arbitrary, since presumably a Christian theologian or scribe of the first few centuries would be steeped in NT thought and vocabulary and would naturally narrate the story of Jesus out of his NT background.

I included an example of that analysis above in response to Goat: the Testamonium uses a term here for Gentiles that is used regularly throughout Josephus' writings, but it only used once in the NT.

Meier looks at more than just the frequency of terms. The Testamonium uses some words in a difference sense from how they are used in the NT. It also includes some (rather) unique phrases that Josephus uses elsewhere in Antiquities, as in this example from 8.1.1:

Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty . . . so men received what they said with pleasure, and this bold attempt proceeded to a great height.

Here is Meier's summary:

The upshot of all this is that, apart from Christianon, not one word of what I identify as the original text of the Testimonium fails to occur elsewhere in Josephus, usually with the same meaning and/or construction. As indicated in the first part of this note, the same cannot be said of the NT. One final caution: Word statistics are used here simply to indicate whether a word occurs fairly frequently either in Josephus or in the NT. The statistics should not be used simplistically to contrast the two bodies of material taken as a whole. Josephus represents a larger corpus of works than does the NT, and he is one well-known author as opposed to numerous NT authors, many of whom are anonymous.

Did that answer your question? I'm far from an expert on this as well, so I'm not sure I've done it justice here.

There is apparently no consensus as to the ‘literary style’ of the TF.

“The question of the style of the passage has elicited diametrically opposed positions. While scholars such as Niese, Linck, Norden, Bilde and Birdsall have regarded the style as not that of Josephus, others such as van Liempt, T. Reinaach, Thackery, Martin, Vermes and Meier have, to varying degrees argued the opposite.

The matter is a complex one and is made more difficult by the fact that the passage is short.� P.217 Jews, Christians and Jewish Christians in Antiquity; James Carleton Paget.

The matter is further complicated by the variations in style found throughout the AJ. Views as to the possible reasons for these stylistic variations are also divided.
On the one hand, we find “Since he could thoroughly rework his sources to suit his own purposes, stylistic inconsistencies are best attributed to Josephus himself, Despite Josephus’ struggle with Greek pronunciation (AF 20.263), he can skilfully emulate the style of Greek classics, which he had studied.� CONTOURS IN THE TEXT; Textual Variations in the Writings of Paul, Josephus, and the Yahad. J. D. H. Norton.

And on the other hand, Thackery, [Josephus: The Man and the Historian] finds the Greek of AJ ‘inconsistent’, attributing its Attic stylistic reminiscences to various literary assistants including a ‘Sophoclean assistant’ in books 15 - 16 and a ‘Thucydidean hack’ in 17 - 19.

The only apparent consensus is therefore that the style varies throughout AJ.

And if Josephus could emulate the style of Greek classics, why couldn’t an interpolator, having read AJ, emulate the style of Josephus emulating the style of Greek classics?

Consequently it is impossible to say with any certainty, based solely upon style, whether TF represents, in whole or part, the work of Josephus or that of an interpolator.

[historia]

This doesn't seem to address my point. My point is that once its been established that a part of the text has been tampered with then our attitude toward the rest of the text must change. We can no longer look neutrally upon the text. Instead we must now assume other parts may also have been tampered with unless we can demonstrate otherwise.

I understand what you're saying, and I don't think we disagree. I wouldn't have spent a dozen posts in this thread arguing in favor of partial interpolation if I thought the burden of proof lay entirely with those who believe in full interpolation. I've done my part to "demonstrate otherwise" -- whether that has been successful or not, I leave to you.

If its true that we agree that there is a burden of proof required to establish the authenticity of the documents claims then I find it odd that you were so adamant in demanding that evidence must be offered to demonstrate intentional forgery. Such seems like a red-herring when you said: I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I think my loose use of this metaphor introduced (unintended) confusion into the conversation.

Recognizing that, I tried to offer a more precise analogy in my subsequent response, showing that establishing motive is critical to the question of murder versus manslaughter. The crucial difference there is that we are not beginning our analysis from a presumption of innocence, but rather from some kind of crime. Motive is necessary to prove murder, though.

Likewise, I am not beginning my analysis of the TF from a position that the text is authenticate until proven otherwise, but rather from a position that the text has been tampered with, and we are arguing over the extent of that tampering. A motive is necessary to make a (good) case for forgery, though. My first analogy didn't really capture that.

I agree that if someone is going to make a positive claim of intentional forgery then they need to back that up. But that is a just distraction from the point.

But that is to me the entire point of argument #6, and the subsequent analogies trying to explain it. My original point here is that the main, rival hypothesis to my own is, in some sense, incomplete.

In so far as our conversation has moved beyond that basic point, I feel that we are perhaps arguing more over my clumsy use of an analogy than any significant disagreement on the points you have raised.

We may not entirely see eye to eye, so let's continue:

Whether or not intentional forgery can be substantiated is irrelevant to proving the texts authenticity once its established that particular sections have been corrupted.

I would freely admit that this particular argument to motive is different from the others. It is not a positive claim to partial interpolation so much as a negative criticism of another hypothesis. A preemptive strike, if you will.

That seems to be your overarching criticism as well -- that this makes no positive case for my position -- and I appreciate and agree with your assessment in that regard.

1) Showing a weakness in a hypothesis does not strengthen another hypothesis unless the two hypotheses exhaust all possible hypotheses for the situation (which they don't). In other words, showing a weakness in a hypothesis only strengthens the NULL HYPOTHESIS. Hypotheses stand on their own merit.

But, once we have established corruption of the text, are there are not, broadly speaking, two hypotheses to explain that: total interpolation or partial interpolation?

I suppose one could argue total interpolation separate from intentional forgery, so perhaps I'm guilty of conflating those two positions. But can we reasonably talk of an accidental total interpolation? Maybe there are subtleties I'm missing here.

2) This is a violation of one of the principles I mentioned before. The principle was that speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it. Yet you argue:
a) we cannot think of any convincing motivation or context for a complete forgery.
b) therefore the argument that the text is a complete forgery is weakened.
c) therefore the argument that the text is authentic is bolstered.

I guess I would rephrase (c) entirely to say that this now bolsters the position that the corruption is better understood as a gloss as opposed to a forgery. But that, in itself, is insufficient. The "authenticity" of the (remaining) text would need to be established on other grounds.

Does that mean I disagree with your principle? I don't know, honestly.

[scourge99]

This doesn't seem to address my point. My point is that once its been established that a part of the text has been tampered with then our attitude toward the rest of the text must change. We can no longer look neutrally upon the text. Instead we must now assume other parts may also have been tampered with unless we can demonstrate otherwise.

I understand what you're saying, and I don't think we disagree. I wouldn't have spent a dozen posts in this thread arguing in favor of partial interpolation if I thought the burden of proof lay entirely with those who believe in full interpolation. I've done my part to "demonstrate otherwise" -- whether that has been successful or not, I leave to you.

If its true that we agree that there is a burden of proof required to establish the authenticity of the documents claims then I find it odd that you were so adamant in demanding that evidence must be offered to demonstrate intentional forgery. Such seems like a red-herring when you said: I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I think my loose use of this metaphor introduced (unintended) confusion into the conversation.

Recognizing that, I tried to offer a more precise analogy in my subsequent response, showing that establishing motive is critical to the question of murder versus manslaughter. The crucial difference there is that we are not beginning our analysis from a presumption of innocence, but rather from some kind of crime. Motive is necessary to prove murder, though.

I dislike analogies except as supplementary to help explain a point: http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... p?p=321333

I think people can get too carried away with their analogies without noticing how their analogy is imperfect. I prefer people just say what they mean.

So to continue our analogy....perhaps it was suicide. Or perhaps it was accidental suicide. Or a number of other possibilities. A failure to prove murder does not prove or default to manslaughter. And failing to prove manslaughter does not prove murder.

I agree that to convict someone of murder a satisfactory motive is usually required. But each charge is tried on its own merit.

Likewise, I am not beginning my analysis of the TF from a position that the text is authenticate until proven otherwise,

Ok.

but rather from a position that the text has been tampered with, and we are arguing over the extent of that tampering. A motive is necessary to make a (good) case for forgery, though. My first analogy didn't really capture that.

No motive is required to maintain the default position. I.E., to accept the null hypothesis.

The default position in this case, as i have argued, is skepticism in regards to the authenticity of the text BECAUSE corruption, to some extent, has been established.

I agree that if someone is going to make a positive claim of intentional forgery then they need to back that up. But that is a just distraction from the point.

But that is to me the entire point of argument #6, and the subsequent analogies trying to explain it. My original point here is that the main, rival hypothesis to my own is, in some sense, incomplete.

In so far as our conversation has moved beyond that basic point, I feel that we are perhaps arguing more over my clumsy use of an analogy than any significant disagreement on the points you have raised.

We may not entirely see eye to eye, so let's continue:

Whether or not intentional forgery can be substantiated is irrelevant to proving the texts authenticity once its established that particular sections have been corrupted.

I would freely admit that this particular argument to motive is different from the others. It is not a positive claim to partial interpolation so much as a negative criticism of another hypothesis. A preemptive strike, if you will.

That seems to be your overarching criticism as well -- that this makes no positive case for my position -- and I appreciate and agree with your assessment in that regard.

Now I see the problem.
You have set out 4 hypothesis and deemed that these are the ONLY acceptable choices available and that we MUST choose one. This leads you to make the erroneous conclusion that if any of them are weakened then it must bolster one of the others. This is a flawed approach and perhaps the root of our disagreement.

I do not accept the premise that one of these hypotheses MUST be accepted.
Thus a lack of evidence for a particular hypothesis is not evidence for another particular hypothesis.

1) Showing a weakness in a hypothesis does not strengthen another hypothesis unless the two hypotheses exhaust all possible hypotheses for the situation (which they don't). In other words, showing a weakness in a hypothesis only strengthens the NULL HYPOTHESIS. Hypotheses stand on their own merit.

But, once we have established corruption of the text, are there are not, broadly speaking, two hypotheses to explain that: total interpolation or partial interpolation? I suppose one could argue total interpolation separate from intentional forgery, so perhaps I'm guilty of conflating those two positions. But can we reasonably talk of an accidental total interpolation? Maybe there are subtleties I'm missing here.

This discussion about possibilities reminds me of the Christian argument that Jesus must be lord, liar or lunatic. Well what about Legend? What about some from each category? What about other possibilities?

I think there are many possibilities when it comes to the text of Josephus. And they aren't all mutually exclusive.
E.G.,
a) completely unadulterated.
b) contains intentional forgery
c) contains copyist errors
d) contain interpolation
e) contains a gloss
f) any combination of b, c, d, e.
g) ...

2) This is a violation of one of the principles I mentioned before. The principle was that speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it. Yet you argue:
a) we cannot think of any convincing motivation or context for a complete forgery.
b) therefore the argument that the text is a complete forgery is weakened.
c) therefore the argument that the text is authentic is bolstered.

I guess I would rephrase (c) entirely to say that this now bolsters the position that the corruption is better understood as a gloss as opposed to a forgery. But that, in itself, is insufficient. The "authenticity" of the (remaining) text would need to be established on other grounds.

Does that mean I disagree with your principle? I don't know, honestly.

1) You are NOT required to choose a hypothesis.

2) Each hypothesis stands on its own merit.

3) absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. E.G., not finding any evidence to indicate a motivation for forgery is not evidence that someone was not motivated to forge it.

[Mithrae]

but rather from a position that the text has been tampered with, and we are arguing over the extent of that tampering. A motive is necessary to make a (good) case for forgery, though. My first analogy didn't really capture that.

No motive is required to maintain the default position. I.E., to accept the null hypothesis.

The default position in this case, as i have argued, is skepticism in regards to the authenticity of the text BECAUSE corruption, to some extent, has been established.

While I'm not as knowledgeable on the matter as Historia or Student, I'd be extremely surprised if there were any ancient text in which we can't point out some probable changes or corruptions.

So by your reasoning we should, until proven otherwise, adopt a default position of "skepticism in regards to the authenticity of the text."

If by scepticism you mean not considering something certain and maintaining a questioning attitude I'd say that's a 'default' position regardless, known corruption or not. If you mean presuming it to have no value in contributing to our knowledge pool, well... this is the approach which some self-described 'sceptics' I've encountered take towards all biblical texts (when it suits them, at least).

But it's an extraordinarily simplistic view, in my opinion at least. Once we've established that a text has been altered in some manner - as I strongly suspect all ancient texts have - we should probably ask to what extent they've been altered, whether they're intentional forgery, copying errors, glosses or whatnot, rather than presuming 'skepticism' towards the whole thing.