Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:47 am
PART 2.1
Lastly, Dave Allen's point about the location of the Testimonium within Josephus Antiquities at 18.63-64:
(17) The location of the Testimonium makes more sense for a negative original than the current form
Allen: Significantly, the TF is to be found right in the very middle of the rebel passages. This argues against an ex nihilo interpolation, since it is highly unlikely that Christian scribes would have chosen to put their testimony to Jesus right in the middle of the rebel section of Antiquities. This observation supports the rebel paradigm for Jesus. This is underappreciated.
Far from being underappreciated, I think this is overstated. Many of the arguments about negative tone depend on the theory that Josephus wrote them in the first place. We have to first assume Josephus wrote them in order to understand their tone as negative; the same words that might sound negative coming from Josephus do not when coming from Eusebius.
A negative TF theory, I would suggest, rests more with acknowledging the gospel underlying rebel/zealot type Jesus than any negative argument supposedly from Josephus. (after all a rebel Jesus theory has been around for a long time, Bermejo-Rubio being a more recent advocate of the theory. Dave Allen has no need to resort to a reconstructed TF for his negative Jesus TF theory.)
I think these kinds of objections greatly overstate the amount of attention Christians paid to the context of the Testimonium within Josephus Antiquities. I have said before that I have no firm opinion on whether a later scribe took the Testimonium from the Ecclesiastical History and placed it within the Antiquities or whether Eusebius oversaw the placement himself; I have said I don't think he wrote the passage for the context of the Antiquities, but for the context in his own work (most probably the Demonstratio). I think the insertion into the Antiquities came later, and the location was probably chosen because it was the first point after the introduction of Pilate the procurator of Judea in 18.55 where the passage could fit without breaking into the middle of an existing story.
Eusebius wrote:
(Josephus) in the eighteenth book of his Antiquities, says that about the twelfth year of the reign of Tiberius, who had succeeded to the empire after Augustus had ruled fiftyseven years, Pontius Pilate was entrusted with the government of Judea, and that he remained there ten full years, almost until the death of Tiberius.
2. Accordingly the forgery of those who have recently given currency to acts against our Saviour is clearly proved. For the very date given in them shows the falsehood of their fabricators. 3. For the things which they have dared to say concerning the passion of the Saviour are put into the fourth consulship of Tiberius, which occurred in the seventh year of his reign; at which time it is plain that Pilate was not yet ruling in Judea, if the testimony of Josephus is to be believed, who clearly shows in the above-mentioned work that Pilate was made procurator of Judea by Tiberius in the twelfth year of his reign.
Eusebius. The History of the Church (p. 19). Kindle Edition.
So, Eusebius has labeled the 7th year Acts of Pilate crucifixion story a 'forgery'. Eusebius says, re his reading of Josephus, that Pilate was not in Judea in the 7th year of Tiberius. ( i.e. around 21 c.e.) He dates Pilate to the 12th year of Tiberius, 26 c.e. If, as suggested, it was not Eusebius but a scribe that interpolated the TF (whether or not overseen by Eusebius) why place the interpolation in a time slot already rejected by Eusebius. ? (i.e. a time slot prior to 26 c.e.) If the scribe made a mistake - and Eusebius failed to correct the mistake - then he would be viewed as guilty of the interpolation as the scribe.
The fact that the interpolator did not place his interpolated TF somewhere other than 19 c.e. suggests, not that he could not find a better place to put it - but that a core TF was already in place in the context of 19 c.e. Nikoa Kokkinos, for example, has a scenario where the Jesus crucifixion is dated to 36 c.e. and, reading the gospel crucifixion story into Josephus, has the Josephan figure of John killed in 35 c.e.
But when we look at the argument that an interpolator would not have placed it within that context because it would reflect negatively on Jesus, placing him alongside rebels and charlatans, we have to ask - where's the evidence that any Christian of the ancient or medieval period ever cared about that? Like many of the objections to the interpolation theory, I don't think we have any evidence that anyone ever made such an objection until the authenticity of the text came into question during the Reformation. I don't think the observation that the context reflected negatively on Jesus was ever made until it was used as defense of the theory of Josephan authorship.
Eusebius is the one who should have made the objection to placing an interpolated TF in a context of 19 c.e. Seemingly, he did not do so. Perhaps he, and other later writers, had no grounds on which to object to the 19 c.e. dating of the TF. Yes, he complained about the Acts of Pilate and it's 21 c.e. crucifixion dating - but his supposed interpolated TF in a context of 19 c.e. - did not remove the scenarios that placed a crucifixion prior to the 26 c.e. date for Pilate. In effect his supposed TF interpolation in 19 c.e., rather than achieving what he desired, continued to uphold the possibility of a pre 26 c.e. crucifixion story under Pilate.
The Josephan context of the TF, 19 c.e., does not necessitate, due to the civil unrest over the Roman standards and the tax over the water works - a negative TF. Josephus has also brought Germanous into the 19 c.e. history. Ant.18.2.5. By doing so providing an image of an extraordinary man:
It is generally agreed, that Germanicus possessed all the noblest endowments of body and mind in a higher degree than had ever before fallen to the lot of any man; a handsome person, extraordinary courage, great proficiency in eloquence and other branches of learning, both Greek and Roman; besides a singular humanity, and a behaviour so engaging, as to captivate the affections of all about him..............He was so extremely popular, that many authors tell us, the crowds of those who went to meet him upon his coming to any place, or to attend him at his departure, were so prodigious, that he was sometimes in danger of his life; and that upon his return from Germany, after he had quelled the mutiny in the army there, all the cohorts of the pretorian guards marched out to meet him, notwithstanding the order that only two should go; and that all the people of Rome, both men and women, of every age, sex, and rank, flocked as far as the twentieth mile-stone to attend his entrance.................At the time of his death, however, and afterwards, they displayed still greater and stronger proofs of their extraordinary attachment to him. The day on which he died, stones were thrown at the temples, the altars of the gods demolished, the household gods, in some cases, thrown into the streets, and new-born infants exposed. It is even said that barbarous nations, both those engaged in intestine wars, and those in hostilities against us, all agreed to a cessation of arms, as if they had been mourning for some very near and common friend; that some petty kings shaved their beards and their wives heads, in token of their extreme sorrow; and that the king of kings1 forbore his exercise of hunting and feasting with; his nobles, which, amongst the Parthians, is equivaleii to a cessation of all business in a time of public mourning with us.
C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Caligula
And so the people grieved the more bitterly as though Germanicus was again lost to them.
Triumphal arches were erected at Rome, on the banks of the Rhine, and on mount Amanus in Syria, with an inscription recording his achievements, and how he had died in the public service. A cenotaph was raised at Antioch, where the body was burnt, a lofty mound at Epidaphna, where he had ended his life. The number of his statues, or of the places in which they were honoured, could not easily be computed.
As to the body which, before it was burnt, lay bare in the forum at Antioch, its destined place of burial,
Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals 2.
If the mourning was spread geographically across the Empire, it was also spread in time. Tacitus, writing almost a century later, noted that at least some of the rituals and honours continued to be performed. In the early twentieth century, a document came to light on the very Eastern fringes of the Roman Empire at a place called Dura. It was a religious calendar likely dating from the AD 220s. This document, known as the Feriale Durarum (partial translation), is a religious calendar of a military unit stationed at Dura. Among the festive days to be recognised was the birth and death of Germanicus.
Death of Germanicus
https://ancientromanhistory31-14.com/ho ... ermanicus/
Such was the life and death of Germanicus. The Josephan TF is placed in the year of his death. A TF placed in the year of the death of Germanicus corresponds far more likely to be a positive not a negative correspondence to a TF placed in that year. A negative story about some Jews expelled from Rome in 19 c.e. can hardly be viewed as cancelling out the overwhelming Roman positive reaction to the life of Germanicus and the accolades according to him after his death.
The TF placed in the year of the death of Germanicus might not have had any appeal for Christians such as Eusebius. If the Jewish Josephus was finding some relevance to this Roman death and his TF story about a wise man crucified/executed by the Romans - then so be it. What did Christians have to gain from Jewish history. After all - did not the gospels say the Jews killed their Jesus. Perhaps, later, desperately seeking some historical witness to their Jesus, would the Jewish historian's interest between his people's history and the life and death of Germanicus be side aside - and the wise man story could then be christianized in a more familiar christian dress.
The question therefore is - what is Josephus remembering with his wise man crucified under Pilate in 19 c.e. What did the death of Germanicus bring to mind for a Hasmonean/Jewish historian? The mention of Antioch, as a place where the body of Germanicus lay in the forum, would remind this Hasmonean/Jewish historian of the execution of the last King and High Priest of the Jews executed at Antioch in 37 b.c.
''Dion Cassius says, 'Antony now gave the Kingdom to a certain Herod, and having stretched Antigonus on the cross and scourged him, which had never been done before to a king by the Romans, he put him to death'. The sympathies of the masses for the crucified king of Judah, the heroic son of so many heroic ancestors, and the legends growing, in time, out of this historical nucleus, became, perhaps, the source from which Paul and the evangelists preached Jesus as the crucified king of Judea.'' (History of the Hebrew's Second Commonwealth, 1880, Cincinnati, page 206)
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), scholar and novelist
http://collections.americanjewisharchiv ... wealth.pdf
Rome had it's sorrows over Germanicus in 19 c.e. Hasmonean Jews had their sorrows over Antigonus in 37 b.c. Two men, one in line to be the heir to Tiberius - the other the legitimate Hasmonean king of the Jews.
Germanicus
Josephus was a Hasmonean/Jewish historian. However much he knew Greek and perhaps played around with it's grammar - his foothold lay in his own people's history. Without taking that history on board the TF will remain a source of frustration for both the Jesus historicists and the Jesus ahistoricists. Both camps have a stake in the TF. Both sides need to put their arguments over Greek grammar aside and let the historical chips fall where they will......