Dave Allen: an analysis

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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maryhelena
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by maryhelena »

Giuseppe wrote: Wed Oct 20, 2021 9:17 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Wed Oct 20, 2021 3:09 pmand, as you later correct Allen rightly, the passage immediately following isn't a "rebel passage," being a calamity of another sort
possibly I may be wrong also on that, since, possibly, Allen may interpret the incipit of the passage immediately following "After another disgrace put the Jews in trouble" as meaning rather: "After another disgrace put the Jews in revolt".

As I have possibly made it a bit transparent, I would like the general conclusions of Allen (especially, the possibility that the enemies of Christians appealed en masse to the original negative TF).

Just as a matter of interest - the Slavonic Josephus version of the TF places it between the incident of the Roman standard and the water works. Whereas in Antiquities the TF is placed after the water works incident.

We are ready like sheep for slaughter,*
rather than transgress the Law."
Pilate was amazed
at their fear of God and their purity.
And he ordered the scmaia
to be removed from Jerusalem.
°At that time there appeared a man,
if it is proper to call him a man
............

And then
<the Jews> raised a second disturbance
.............

Josephus' Jewish War and Its Slavonic Version: A Synoptic Comparison: by H. Leeming (Author), K. Leeming (Author) Page 261-262

here

This account of the TF seems to place it around the time of Pilate's arrival in Judaea. Hence dating Pilate becomes an issue - an issue that Eusebius questioned with 'if Josephus is to be believed' (or words to that effect). re the Acts of Pilate dating to the 7th year of Tiberius. In recent years scholarship, especially from Daniel Schwartz, has suggested Pilate was in Judaea from around 18 c.e. Antiquities settles the question of dating the TF - and Pilate - by placing the TF prior to or around the expelling of Jews from Rome by Tiberius in 19 c.e.

(yes, Josephus dating of Pilate re his listing of the Roman governors is later than 18/19 c.e. - but viewed re his dating of the TF - questions arise regarding his dating of Roman governors of Judaea - re Daniel Schwartz. Seems to me that efforts were afoot to move Pilate later to fit the gospel timeline - as the JC story itself was developing - and as seems evident that the TF itself was also in a process of development. That the TF stayed in place (around 19 c.e. in Antiquities and early in Pilate's rule in Slavonic Josephus) while Pilate was moved along in Josephus's chronology to 26 c.e. is perhaps an indication that all is not straightforward with Josephus.......or the TF.)

-----------
added later

Perhaps the Acts of Pilate and it's 7th year of Tiberius crucifixion story was written prior to Antiquities i.e. Antiquities with its 'new' chronology for Roman governors in Judea and it's 26 c.e. dating for Pilate. If so - then the question becomes was there an earlier TF in Josephus 'War' - as we now have in the Slavonic Josephus version of 'War'. ?
.............

added later....

The problem Eusebius had with the Acts of Pilate is that it does not work with gLuke and it's Quirinius birth narrative and the 15th year of Tiberius. Unable, or unwilling to resolve this problem he simple relied on Antiquities 'new' chronology for Pilate. However, if one views the Jesus story as a developing story then discrepancies like gLuke are not problematic but enlightening. Putting gLuke aside - the crucifixion dating in Acts of Pilate, 7th year of Tiberius - around 22/21 c.e. works very well with the nativity story in Slavonic Josephus. i.e. a nativity story set prior to the 15th year of Herod. Counting from 37 b.c. one gets to around 22 b.c. plus 19 c.e. Antiquities TF dating and gospel Jesus is around 40 years old in the 7th year of Tiberius.

Thus, a shifting or developing Jesus story. gMatthew works well with Slavonic Josephus birth narrative if the mention of Herod's death and Archelaus is viewed as an update, a development away from earlier in Herod 's rule to late in Herod's rule. The slaughter of the innocents story is more fitting to the events surrounding Herod and Jerusalem in 37 b.c.

So they were murdered continually in the narrow streets, and in the houses by crowds; and as they were flying to the temple for shelter: and there was no pity taken of either infants, or the aged: nor did they spare so much as the weaker sex. Ant. 14.16.2

One could maybe argue that by leaving the TF in a timeslot of 19 ce. that Josephus was acknowledging an earlier version of the Jesus story. By moving Pilate to 26 c.e. Josephus is accommodating the newer gluke version and its Quirinius and 15th year of Tiberius timeline.

Bottom line - a developing Jesus story indicates not a historical Jesus but a literary Jesus. Hence, there is no reason at all for Jesus ahistoricsts to continue to argue over Eusebius being the one who originated and interpolated the TF into Josephus Antiquities. Time to move on and deal with why Josephus was so accommodating for gLuke....
Last edited by maryhelena on Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
ABuddhist
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

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neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Oct 20, 2021 4:04 pm Can someone list other instances where a copyist changes the tone of a passage in order to suit his ideology: e.g. reading a negative portrayal of a figure whom the copyist adores and changing it to an adoring portrait, or reading a positive portrayal of a figure the copyist loathes and changing it to praiseworthy portrait?
The closest thing that I can think of is an American allegation (proven to be untrue) that various politicians (changing with the times) discovered that they were related to a criminal and distorted the criminal's biography in order to make him seem law-abiding and respectable. To cite one example (and more can be read here https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/horse-thief-ancestor/ ):

Tipper Gore, an amateur genealogical researcher, discovered that her husband’s great-great uncle, Gunther Gore, a fellow lacking in character, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Tennessee in 1889. The only known photograph of Gunther shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is this inscription:”Gunther Gore; horse thief, sent to Tennessee Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Tennessee Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.”

After letting Al Gore and his staff of professional image consultants peruse the findings, they decided to crop Gunther’s picture, scan it in as an enlarged image, and edited it with image processing software so that all that’s seen is a head shot.

The accompanying biographical sketch was sent to the Associated Press as follows:

“Gunther Gore was a famous rancher in early Tennessee history. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Tennessee railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Gunther passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.”
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Irish1975
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Irish1975 »

That’s an amusing story, ABuddhist.

In the modern era there has been Bowderlization, a practice common in the Victorian era where unseemly texts were made suitable for ladies and children. And since WW1, in many societies there has been a high level of political propaganda in mass media. Perhaps both of these modern practices incline us to suppose that something similar must have happened in ancient times. After Constantine and Eusebius, the Church was in a fairly novel position of having to reorient the legacy of the past to suit their present religion. The reforms of Ahkenaten and Josiah are not really comparable since there was almost no literacy, no schools, libraries, etc. At any rate, their reforms failed where the Christian revolution convinced everyone for over a thousand years.
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Ken Olson
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Ken Olson »

PART 1

I want to thank Peter Kirby for starting a new thread on Dave Allen’s paper:

Dave Allen, The Use of the Testimonium Flavianum by Anti-Christian Polemicists. R M Price, ed., Journal of Higher Criticism 16/1 (Spring 2021), 42-105.

Available for download on Allen’s blog here:

https://davesblogs.home.blog/2021/05/12 ... cal-jesus/

I agree with most of Kirby’s criticisms but want to add a few of my own here. Before proceeding to the specific arguments, I want to point out two global problems with the paper:

First, the initial premise of Allen’s theory - that there was an authentic Josephan Testimonium in Antiquities 18.63-64 that existed before the present, non-Josephan text – is not established by the arguments he gives. Allen relies mainly on repeating arguments from Alice Whealey ‘s 2007 paper to try to establish the non-Eusebian nature of the text. While he does not accept Whealey’s theory of near-total authenticity - far from it! - he does repeat a number of her arguments and particularly those having to do with Josephan versus Eusebian language without adequate, or really any, analysis.

Allen does not attempt to deal with either my counter-arguments or my additional arguments from my 2013 “Eusebian Reading” paper, which makes me suspect he is dependent solely on Whealey for the Josephan vs. Eusebian language issue (i.e., where Whealey hasn’t made an argument, Allen doesn’t have one). This is a general problem in recent the scholarship on the Testimonium issue. Those who want to argue argue for a partially authentic Testimonium frequently appeal to the authority of Whealey (and to a lesser degree Paget) as having answered me without actually examining her arguments. It is not at all difficult to demonstrate that Whealey and Paget are wrong on the facts in places (I do this in the 2013 paper), and as far as I am aware no published scholar has accepted Whealey’s theory of near-total authenticity, so they must think she’s wrong about quite a lot. Yet the ad hoc nature of her arguments on Eusebian vs. Josephan language is ignored. I will deal with the ones Allen uses below.[Note: I won't get to them in this post, but I will in part 2).

Second, if we grant the undemonstrated premise that there was an original Josephan Testimonium in the first place, there is a second problem in the speculative nature of what Allen places in it. If the wording is not what’s in the text, how do we know what it is? Allen does not accept what is there and substitutes something else which – based on other sources – Josephus could plausibly have said. This leads to another problem. The Testimonium he reconstructs can’t tell us anything about the historical Jesus, or even about Jesus as he was perceived by outsiders at the end of the first and the beginning of the second centuries, that we don’t already know. We have to assume the rebel Jesus hypothesis in order to reconstruct the Testimonium. But if we already accept the rebel Jesus hypothesis, the Testimonium adds nothing to our knowledge.

I’ll deal with a few of Allen’s specific arguments following the numbering in Kirby’s OP.

(1) Origen's reference

Allen: First let us analyze the TF word for word and set forth reasons for thinking there was an original negative TF. Whealey [4] has said Origen made an assertion that Josephus did not believe Jesus as the Christ (Contra Cels.1.47), and that it shows that his copy of Josephus’ Antiquities had a negative treatment of Jesus. It’s not good enough to say Josephus would not have acknowledged Jesus as the messiah because he is Jewish -- why would he even mention this assertion unless Jesus was mentioned? There is no reason to bring that up and weaken his own argument unless in Origen’s copy there was a mention about Jesus, missing the line “he was the Christ.”

I previously discussed this issue here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=618&p=12571&=mcgrath+origen#p12571

In brief, Origen introduces Josephus as an unbelieving Jew because he wants to cite him as an outside (non-Chritian) witness to support his case. He knows there are believing Jews (Jewish Christians) and wants to make clear Josephus is not one of them. It is necessary for the argument that he is making.

(4) Argues that the description was of "a certain" (tis) "man"

Besides Kirby's point about whether Jesus was named in the text, I contest this part of Allen's argument:

Allen: No scribe would have interpolated the word τις, but this phrase could have escaped a copyist attempting to interpolate the original TF. The use of “certain” suggests a figure not well known. The qualification of “certain” would be omitted only if the figure was well known.

Why should we assume that no scribe, or no Christian author, would have interpolated the word τις ?

The argument, which is never spelled out fully, seems to be: The word τις, found in one manuscript of Eusebius’ Church History, must be original to Josephus because we can imagine how Josephus would have used it disparagingly, and Christian scribes would have omitted the disparaging reference, but we cannot imagine any plausible way that it went the other way, that someone added τις

τις is not inherently disparaging. It can be used to introduce a new, or not well known character, but that character could be viewed either positively or negatively. The Acts of the Apostles uses τις to introduce (or re-introduce) characters who are viewed positively in Acts 9.43, 10.1, 10.6, 16.1 (the introduction of Timothy!), 21.10 and 22.12.

Perhaps more importantly, we find “a certain Jesus” in Acts 25.19 on the lips of Festus and in the Gospel of Nicodemus 20.1 on the lips of Satan. To be sure, those references might well be dismissive or even disparaging on the lips of those characters. But the point is that in both cases “a certain Jesus” is placed on the lips of outsiders by Christian writers. It’s how Christians thought outsiders might refer to him.

Best wishes,

Ken

PS I will try to post Part 2, covering Allen's points (as enumerated by Peter Kirby) 7, 14, 15, and 17 tomorrow.
Roger Pearse
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

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I had thought the Old Slavonic "Josephus" was now definitely dead, as a source of truth about the TF, once the work was properly published and plainly an original medieval composition drawing on Malalas etc.
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Ken Olson
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Ken Olson »

Roger Pearse wrote: Sat Oct 23, 2021 5:15 am I had thought the Old Slavonic "Josephus" was now definitely dead, as a source of truth about the TF, once the work was properly published and plainly an original medieval composition drawing on Malalas etc.
I will take the somewhat unusual step of agreeing with Roger on something to do with the Testimonium. In his mammoth study of the Slavonic Josephus, N.A. Meschersky's argued that work was composed by drawing out the material related to Josephus from the older and larger Slavonic Chronography, which had Josephus' Jewish War and George Hamartolus' (AKA George Monachus) Chronicle, as well as John Malalas among its sources. Hamartolus' Chronicle contained the Testimonium, taken from Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, making that the only solidly known route by which the TF could have made it into the Slavonic Josephus.

But on this list people often don't feel obliged to go with what's known or with the case with the strongest evidence.

Best wishes,

Ken

PS The link to Roger's own page on the Slavonic Josephus:

https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/jose ... avonic.htm
Giuseppe
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Giuseppe »

Ken, at any case it is not necessary to disturb the Slavonic bullshit etc if we assume that Tacitus, under the hypothesis that he was based on the original Testimonium, had not found the name "Jesus", and he had done so by making himself alone the association between "a certain (tis) man" and the Christ preached by the Christians. I would like to save the Allen's point that in the original Testimonium Jesus was not named as "Jesus", without being obliged to appeal to Slavonic texts.
Roger Pearse
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Roger Pearse »

Ken Olson wrote: Sat Oct 23, 2021 5:39 am I will take the somewhat unusual step of agreeing with Roger on something to do with the Testimonium. In his mammoth study of the Slavonic Josephus, N.A. Meschersky's argued that work was composed by drawing out the material related to Josephus from the older and larger Slavonic Chronography, which had Josephus' Jewish War and George Hamartolus' (AKA George Monachus) Chronicle, as well as John Malalas among its sources. Hamartolus' Chronicle contained the Testimonium, taken from Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, making that the only solidly known route by which the TF could have made it into the Slavonic Josephus.
A rare moment indeed! Thank you for the link to that very old web page.

I believe that Malalas *also* contains version of the TF. And one family of manuscripts of the Jewish War also acquired the TF interpolated into it (doubtless from a marginal comment). So that's three versions available to the Old Slavonic author, all Byzantine Greek, all extant in the original Greek. There is no need to consult the Old Slavonic at all.

The idea of G.A.Williamson was that it drew from an Aramaic source. This circulated widely because it was in his excellent Penguin translation. But the idea is unevidenced, and based on speculation, at a time when access to that text was basically impossible.

I am deeply dubious that any text of the TF survives that has *not* been influenced by the Eusebian version (with the obvious exception of Jerome's Latin version). All very flaky.

Best wishes,

Roger Pearse
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maryhelena
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by maryhelena »

Roger Pearse wrote: Sat Oct 23, 2021 5:15 am I had thought the Old Slavonic "Josephus" was now definitely dead, as a source of truth about the TF, once the work was properly published and plainly an original medieval composition drawing on Malalas etc.
Happily - the Slavonic Josephus is not dead. It's alive and well. A gift horse for the ahistoricists - but shunned by the Jesus historicists. Dating manuscripts does not date the creation of the contents of the manuscript. Old wine in new skins sort of thing. As for the TF story in Slavonic Josephus and it's dating structure - check out this post: here
Giuseppe
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Re: Dave Allen: an analysis

Post by Giuseppe »

The same invention of the Slavonic Testimonium would be really evidence going against the presence of a previous Testimonium about Jesus.

The interpolator of the Slavonic Testimonium introduced the first time what he considered necessary but not still found there: a reference to Jesus.

If the interpolator of the Slavonic Testimonium had found a previous Eusebian Testimonium in Josephus, he wouldn't have invented one entirely new in replacement of it.
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