Ken Olson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 07, 2019 5:43 pmAs an aside, if the author of Acts invented the letter of the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, is that a forgery? I and many others, including some fairly conservative scholars, think he composed the apostles speeches himself. But if he composed the text of a document attributes to the apostles, is that different?
Very good question. I think that if he knew (somehow) that the apostles sent out a letter, but he did not have that letter in his possession, then his filling out of the details is rather like Thucydides creating speeches: there were probably speeches delivered, but no transcript is/was available. (For Acts, there was a letter sent, but it has not been preserved.) To invent the very fact of there being such a letter is a step beyond, in my estimation.
IIUC, Polybius did not subscribe to Thucydides' practice of inventing "appropriate" speeches.
As an aside, I am not really all that interested in the morality or the ethics involved, at least not for their own sake. These people are long dead; judging them in a moralistic way seems fruitless. What makes me pursue this line of questioning is my estimate of what a person is capable of. Inowlocki, for example, makes an argument against fraud by Eusebius that depends at least in part on her perception of Eusebius' character; she concludes that it would be "unfair" to charge him with such a thing. Part of her argument fails, in my opinion (the part where she draws upon Eusebius' own attitude toward forgeries by heretics); but part of it is similar to how I have felt about Eusebius for some time now: I have never seen him as the kind of person who would commit a fraud of that nature. And I may well be completely mistaken (for any number of reasons); hence this thread.
Also, my perception of him on this score has been, to date, mostly dependent upon my own wits and partly dependent upon my (limited) understanding of how these kinds of ethical issues worked in antiquity. The former is wholly inadequate for evaluating the issue, since ancient sensibilities may not be reflected in modern ones in general, much less in my own in particular. The latter is a better starting point, at the very least, and I have begun collecting information on ancient perceptions of fraud and forgery (I have access to Ehrman's book on forgery in Christian polemics, for example, and have begun taking notes on the relevant chapters). It may be that ancient attitudes turn out to be so varied that it would be impossible to tell whether Eusebius would draw a line between adjusting the wording now and then, on the one hand, and fabricating an entire passage, in the other. But there is no way to know for sure until I do the bookwork.
One of the reasons (probably the major reasons) I don't use the word forgery is that I didn't want to have to write a chapter on what would or would not constitute forgery by modern and ancient standards.
A wise move, I am certain, despite its apparent ineffectiveness in some quarters.
I'd be interested in knowing what criteria you use in determining which variants are Eusebian and which are not.
I have none! None whatsoever. I was merely musing out loud about the possibilities. Emphasize in your mind's voice the "may" and the "still thinking about them" parts of my sentence, if you would.
I didn't really grasp Inowlocki's argument against me. She thinks that where she finds a variant, and can explain it in terms of Eusebius' theological interests, she can attribute it to Eusebius. I think I've more than met the bar she sets for herself when it comes to the Testimonium.
I think that, in her mind, her arguments against Eusebius having fabricated the entire passage
precede any questions about variants. Once she has satisfied herself that Eusebius did not invent the entire thing, now the variants have to be explained.
She seems to think that attributing Eusebius with producing small changes to Josephus' text when quoting him shows he would not have made large changes, and I think that's a non-sequitur.
I do not see that as her argument. (Do you have a page number for it?) She argues on page 207 that Eusebius' usual practice is to make small adjustments, not to fabricate entire passages. (That is, when Eusebius says that an author wrote something, and he quotes it, when we turn to that author's actual work, if it is still extant, we can find the passage there. I know there is at least one exception: the passage cribbed for Origen, but we can see that even there Eusebius did not invent it wholesale. And I also know that there are many instances we cannot check, since the work is no longer extant.) This is not an argument that small changes imply that no big changes were made; it is, rather, an argument that small changes are in keeping with Eusebius' habits elsewhere and big changes are not. She also argues on page 209 that Eusebius, had he composed the passage, would have attached it to the
Wars, not to the
Antiquities. (Still thinking about this one.) And she points out on page 210 that Josephus saying that "he was the Christ" directly contradicts Origen, so she doubts that Eusebius would have composed that part. (This one feels like something to be responded to, at the very least.)
Also, I think the gloss "the ones who were called the Maccabees" as explanation for the benefit of the reader is very relevant to discussion of the James passage in Ant. 20.200....
I do too. Adding an explanatory gloss in
Antiquities 20 and adding "the ones who were called the Maccabees" strike me as very similar maneuvers in that respect, if one wishes to argue that Eusebius is the one responsible for the gloss. This is a case in which, if someone argues that Eusebius added such a gloss to Josephus' description of a certain James, I can turn to other examples in which Eusebius did pretty much exactly the same thing. It is this sort of exampling that I am seeking with respect to Eusebius having composed the entire Testimonium wholesale; can we catch him in the act of doing that elsewhere? That kind of correspondence would go an incredibly long way with me. Hence, again, this thread.
Granted, one may object that that's not probative, and one would have to explain why the identification of James made it into the manuscripts of Antiquities 20.200 when Origen's passage about James the just did not....
That is a question that I have been asking myself a lot. For me, at least so far, the simplest solution is that Eusebius, if he is responsible for the gloss, was not the one who inserted it into the manuscript; a later scribe did that, a scribe who knew the location (based on Eusebius' information) for that gloss but not the location (based on Eusebius' lack of information) for the passage about James.
This issue also seems to me to pose questions for the Testimonium, as well. If a scribe made good on Eusebius' testimony that Josephus wrote such a paragraph, then I can see how he had to place the Testimonium somewhere in the midst of the Pilate material. But, if Eusebius
himself inserted (or was responsible for inserting) the passage, why would he claim that the John the baptist passage (in Marcellus' section, not Pilate's) came
before the Testimonium? Surely he would have taken some care in placing the Testimonium, and in those circumstances for him to forget seems less likely to me than that he forgot the proper order (of two passages he had no hand in fabricating) simply because John the baptist precedes Jesus in the Christian gospels. This would seem to imply either (A) that Eusebius did not fabricate the Testimonium or (B) that he fabricated it but was not responsible for its current location in the text of Josephus. If he fabricated it, though, and did not insert it, then apparently he was still
thinking of a location after the John the baptist passage; but why, when John the baptist is not discussed until Pilate is off the scene and Marcellus is governing in his stead? Eusebius was obviously concerned about the chronology related to Pilate, judging from his reaction to the Acts of Pilate locating the passion too early; so where, if he composed the passage itself, did he imagine it to be properly located in Josephus' text?
I know there are a lot of moving parts in that series of questions. But I would be interested in knowing how you connect those dots. And is the result easier to handle than (or at least as easy to handle as) the supposition that Eusebius forgot the order of the passages simply because of how the gospels treat John and Jesus? In other words, if he
himself composed the passage, does it not seem at least somewhat less likely that he would have forgotten where it should be located?
Finally, what is happening here? I have not been very interested in the Testimonium for a long time now. (Even this thread, though obviously relevant to the Testimonium, was not actually about it; it was, rather, about figuring out what kind of weight to give to Eusebius' quotations where he cannot be checked.) Yet suddenly I find myself getting back into it. My free time is somewhat straitened right now, but I will try to evaluate your points as I can.
