Iosephiana

[Secret Alias]

The hard part is admitting how bad scholarship in the humanities really is. There is nothing at stake here other than the precious beliefs of mommy and daddy. You can make up any bullshit you want and as long as someone who survived the rigors of 'making it' in the field suddenly has a 'change of heart.' The bullshit is never challenged.

[Secret Alias]

All my references to third year of Trajan = 103 CE should be changed to 101 CE. But that makes little difference here. The point is still the same. Humanities scholarship sucks. Here is another example:

https://books.google.com/books?id=e3jnU ... as&f=false

If we had only this internal evidence, we would confidently date the Life to the period immediately following the Antiquities, which Josephus places in the year 93-94 (Ant. 20.267).

What is this reference?

And if God permit me, I will briefly run over this war, and to add what befell them further to that very day, the 13th of Domitian (= 93 CE) is not, that I have observed, taken distinct notice of by any one; nor do we ever again, with what befell us therein to this very day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and the fifty-sixth year of my own life.

Indeed this is the last sentence almost of Antiquities. So the text begins by saying that Josephus has written this text in response to Justus's Chronicle and then concludes by saying that he will write a 'brief' description of the War and then add to that the history of the Jews until 93 CE. Neither of these statements are accurate. A multi-volume tome on the Jewish War is preserved (in various forms) and no reference of any history of the Jewish people until 93 CE is preserved. Add this the plain fact that the Chronicle of Justus was written in 101 CE and Clement preserving an original edition Josephus dated to 147 CE and you have a Gordian knot, a Gordian knot which is only solved by pulling out a sword and declaring the whole situation counterfeit.

The strange reference to Jews as 'them' in the first sentence is odd. Surely Justus in his Chronicle did indeed reference these same events so the next sentence is counterfeit too. The whole thing is corrupt and untrustworthy.

[Peter Kirby]

Where is the evidence (not wishful thinking) that Justus wrote two texts?

I think it's completely plausible that Justus left one text, mentioned by both Josephus and Photius. I just don't need that assumption. Your argument, however, apparently does. That's all I said.

I did, however, notice that Photius seems to believe that they might be the same text. I also noticed that Photius' 'chronology' of Justus and Josephus' Life were both written [soon] after the death of Agrippa II. So I'm more inclined to give credit to the idea that they are the same work of Justus, than to the opposite.

[Secret Alias]

More from Mason on the strange situation:

Although this internal evidence decisively links the Antiquities and Life together in the years 93 and 94 (perhaps 95), complications arise from the Life's incidental reference to the death of Agrippa II. Josephus chides Iustus (Justus) of Tiberias for not having published his work when Agrippa was still alive (Life 359), although he had allegedly written it up much earlier (§ 360). It is not simply that Agrippa had died by the time that the Life was composed then but enough time had lapsed between the king's death and the Life for Iustus to have published his work and for Josephus to have responded.

If Photius is consulted Justus's chronicle is plainly dated to 101 CE. Clearly then the date for the Josephan corpus is second century.

[Secret Alias]

were both written [soon] after the death of Agrippa II.

There is no need for the 'soon' when we know that Clement possessed a second century edition of Josephus.

[Secret Alias]

If we accept Acts as a second century romance there is no reason to doubt the same might be true with Antiquities. The same arguments apply to both and the case for Josephus is stronger because Clement has a chronicle of 'Flavius Josephus the Jew' dated to 147/48 CE. We don't have that with Acts.

[Secret Alias]

There is numismatic evidence of Agrippa being alive to something like 96 CE.

[Peter Kirby]

were both written [soon] after the death of Agrippa II.

There is no need for the 'soon' when we know that Clement possessed a second century edition of Josephus.

It's implied from the references to Domitian in Life 76, at least.

And Domitian, who succeeded, still augmented his respects to me; for he punished those Jews that were my accusers, and gave command that a servant of mine, who was a eunuch, and my accuser, should be punished. He also made that country I had in Judea tax free, which is a mark of the greatest honor to him who hath it; nay, Domitia, the wife of Caesar, continued to do me kindnesses. And this is the account of the actions of my whole life; and let others judge of my character by them as they please. But to thee, O Epaphroditus, thou most excellent of men! do I dedicate all this treatise of our Antiquities; and so, for the present, I here conclude the whole.

It's also implied from the correction of Justin, who wrote 20 years after the fact, according to Life 65.

But if thou art so hardy as to affirm, that thou hast written that history better than all the rest, why didst thou not publish thy history while the emperors Vespasian and Titus, the generals in that war, as well as king Agrippa and his family, who were men very well skilled in the learning of the Greeks, were all alive? for thou hast had it written these twenty years, and then mightest thou have had the testimony of thy accuracy. But now when these men are no longer with us, and thou thinkest thou canst not be contradicted, thou venturest to publish it.

It's also implied from the 20th book of the Antiquities and its double reference to the year AD 93:

... what befell us therein to this very day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and the fifty-sixth year of my own life.

The whole paragraph is interesting in that Josephus tells the reader basically why he doesn't include more of the Jewish wars in his Antiquities: he is planning to write more about the subject in other books, and to bring Jewish history down to the present day (93 AD) among other projects (some of which, including the Life and the Against Apion, are in our possession).

And now it will not be perhaps an invidious thing, if I treat briefly of my own family, and of the actions of my own life (28) while there are still living such as can either prove what I say to be false, or can attest that it is true; with which accounts I shall put an end to these Antiquities, which are contained in twenty books, and sixty thousand verses. And if God permit me, I will briefly run over this war, and to add what befell them further to that very day, the 13th of Domitian, [or A.D. 93,] is not, that I have observed, taken distinct notice of by any one; nor do we ever again, with what befell us therein to this very day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and the fifty-sixth year of my own life. I have also an intention to write three books concerning our Jewish opinions about God and his essence, and about our laws; why, according to them, some things are permitted us to do, and others are prohibited.

The Jewish Antiquities (Greek: Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἀρχαιολογία, Latin: Antiquitates Judaicae) in 20 books are an ambitious direct literary reference to the (much more famous) Roman Antiquities, also in 20 books:

His great work, entitled Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἀρχαιολογία (Rhōmaikē archaiologia, Roman Antiquities), embraced the history of Rome from the mythical period to the beginning of the First Punic War. It was divided into twenty books ...

Dionysius Halicarnassus also ended his history of the origin of a people with an epoch-making war, so the decision by Josephus to end his own Antiquities with the Jewish war against the Romans is looking more and more credible, if we bother to read the text itself instead of just dreaming up ideas in the abstract.

There are some genuine puzzles created by the references from patristic writers Clement of Alexandria and Photius of Constantinople, but the existence of a puzzle is no proof of the correctness of your particular preferred solution, as it is far from being the only one and suffers from the absence of evidence and the contradiction of what evidence we do have. We should be a little more circumspect than that.

Clement has a chronicle of 'Flavius Josephus the Jew' dated to 147/48 CE.

And Photius "has" a text of Josesphus, The Universe, in codex 48 of his Bibliotheca, which thus came to be attributed to Josephus even though it was supposed to be attributed to Hippolytus.

The crossover of the names Hegesippus and Josephus also occurred, in the direction from Josephus to Hegesippus. Of course, Josephus didn't write Pseudo-Hegesippus either, although it's been attributed to him as early as the fifth century by a certain Eucherius.

This kind of essentialism and bluntness in your argumentation reveals fundamental weakness. Often when people can't make a good case, incorporating all the data in the best possible way, they'll settle for loudly trumpeting a particularly inept reading of a few favored factoids.

[Secret Alias]

and notice the way that Mason perhaps 'the expert' on Josephus completely side steps the evidence at the beginning of Antiquities and the implications on the dating. Also consider the statement that Mason does draw attention to:

The strongest evidence (for the death of Agrippa) comes at Ant. 18.128, where Josephus observes that "within a hundred years (EvTos EKaTov ETcov) of Herod [the Great]'s departure, his descendants — and they were many — had perished, except for a few. Josephus is commenting moralistically on the decline of the law-breaker Herod's once-powerful dynasty. Given that 93 to 94 CE, the presumed period in which Josephus wrote this part of the Antiquities, would already mark between ninety-six and ninety-eight years from Herod's death in 4 BCE, it would make sense for him to use the phrase "within a hundred years" if the Herodian dynasty was effectively finished by his time of writing. Conversely, it would be hard to understand his moral lesson if the most famous descendant of Herod, the very successful Agrippa II,2 was still ruling in 93-94 (contra Kokkinos 1998:396).

But the problem isn't clearly that coins of Agrippa do appear in 95 CE (notice the dating in this book https://books.google.com/books?id=JhsLY ... 22&f=false). Agrippa clearly lived until at least 95 CE. That's a recognized fact among numismatic experts. So the statement in Antiquities clearly contradicts the concluding statement that the text as a whole - i.e. Antiquities - was written in 93 CE. Agrippa must have died 'about a hundred years' from the death of Herod. Josephus knew that and made the comment at a period after 95 CE or whenever Agrippa died. But the text itself cannot have been written in 93 CE because Agrippa was still alive.

[Secret Alias]

I am blunt because the evidence is overwhelming. People who argue against the historicity of Acts do so with much less evidence. But they are destroying Christianity which they (presumably) feel is a moralistic imperative. I am just looking at two pieces of evidence. The existence of Agrippa demonstrated to be at least 95 CE and the clear testimony of Photius that Justus wrote in 101 CE and compare that to absolutely impossible claims of a 93 CE date for the authorship of Antiquities and an explicit testimony that the chronology of 'Flavius Josephus the Jew' was written 147/48 CE. The reason atheists don't seize on this evidence is don't disprove the existence of Christianity. If such evidence existed for the dating of Acts there wouldn't be a question about how this would be used.