Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Ben C. Smith wrote:

Lena Einhorn wrote:
In the story in Matthew, the event takes place in the country of the Gadarenes, and there are TWO demoniacs coming out of the tombs, rather than merely one.


Lena Einhorn wrote:
Earlier in this thread (page 2) I wrote about the two demoniacs in Gerasa/Gadara, who had both dwelled in the tombs. And I made a comparison to the two rebel leaders during the final struggle in Jerusalem -- Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala -- who, when all is destroyed (mostly by them) go hiding in the caverns of Jerusalem, but are finally brought up and punished.

I suspect that the Matthean doubling of a demoniac in Matthew 8.28-34 = Mark 5.1-20 is of a piece with the Matthean doubling of a blind man in Matthew 20.29-34 = Mark 10.46-52, and that both doublings admit of a more prosaically redactional explanation.

Matthew has represented every single miracle present in Mark except two, one exorcism (Mark 1.23-28) and one healing of a blind man (8.22-26). It appears that Matthew has removed two Marcan miracles but still represented their beneficiaries by doubling the beneficiaries of two other miracles of the same kind (exorcism and healing of the blind), in Matthew 8.28-34 and Matthew 20.29-34

That's an interesting parallel example, and I'd love to know why Mark repeats the name ("a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus"; i.e. "a blind beggar named son of Timaeus, the son of Timaeus"), but leaving that strange repetition aside right now:
The doubling in Matthew of the one person mentioned in Mark and Luke can of course have many explanations. But -- as I said earlier in this thread (concerning another example) -- if there are parallels between events described in two sources (e.g. the NT and Josephus), and there are several coinciding elements, it, to my mind, becomes more interesting to explore that entire parallel rather than finding alternative explanations for every single element of the parallel.

The fact that there are a number of coinciding elements between the story of the two demoniacs in Matthew and the final fates of Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala (which I discuss on page 2 in this thread), makes exploring them as possible parallel descriptions of the same event interesting. Now when it comes to the doubling in Matthew (in relation to Mark and Luke): Not only is there a doubling, but the geographical place is suddenly changed -- from Gerasa to Gadara. And neither of them in reality lies anywhere near the Sea of Galilee. So why would we be in Gerasa when there is only one demoniac, and in Gadara when there are two? (aside from the doubling and the change of the location, the stories are almost identical). Well, if we are talking subtext here, one interpretation is that Matthew and Mark should be taken as a whole -- and that more information is supplied when we look at both of them. If, again, we compare with the final fates of Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala, and assume, for the sake of argument, that they are the demoniacs, one of them -- Simon bar Giora -- was born in Gerasa, the other one -- John of Gischala -- first became known for fighting the Gadarenes.
To my mind,thus, the difference between Matthew and Mark actually ADDS food for a comparison with the tale in Josephus.

Michael BG wrote:

If we assume that Matthew created the story that Jesus lived in Egypt so he could apply an Old Testament prophecy to Jesus – “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Mt 2:15c – Hosea 11:1 [When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.{RSV}]) is your theory affected? (It is most likely that neither of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are based on any reliable historical tradition.)

If we only had the gospels of Mark and Q what evidence would you have for your theory?

Ok, they are a lot of issues brought up here:
First: the Old Testament prophecy (Hos 11:1) "Out of Egypt I have called my son." As I have said before, I don't regard the New Testament an ONLY history. It is a lot of things, and written on several levels. On the surface, it is very much sacred text, with many Old Testament references, and many supernatural events described. And underneath that surface, it is very much history (often related to the Jewish rebellion). So applying an Old Testament prophecy to historical events is typical, as I see it, for the New Testament narratives.

Second: The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Here we have perhaps the most glaring contradiction in the New Testament. There are only two birth narratives, and one of them says that Jesus was born 4 BCE, at the latest, whereas the other says he was born in 6 or 7 CE! To my mind, when there are obvious contradictions like that, the information should not be "discarded", but rather the opposite -- the difference means something!
Now if we first take Luke: Luke says that Jesus was born when "a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.
This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria."
What's weird about this indicator -- the tax census under Quirinius -- is that this census is highly significant also according to Josephus, but for a completely different reason! It sparked the first organized Jewish rebellion against Rome:
"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;... All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another."

Now the strange thing about Luke using this census as an indicator of the time when Jesus was born is that he here DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE REVOLT! So the birth of the organized Jewish rebel movement(in Josephus) has become the birth of Jesus (in Luke).
As I see it, this is one of the many examples of rebellion-related subtext in the New Testament. And it says nothing about when Jesus was actually born, but it states when his movement (which I consider to have been a rebel movement) was born.

Now if we look at the second birth narrative, that in Matthew, elaborating on that takes a little longer (for a more detailed description, see "A Shift in Time", pp. 95-105), but very briefly: As you may have gathered, my hypothesis is that the actual events -- as they happened according to Josephus -- where shifted from the late 40s and 50s CE, to the late 20s and 30 CE when depicted in the New Testament. But whereas Luke and Acts seem to have a very consistent subtext on this matter, Mark and Matthew seem to suffer from some jumbled chronology. And if we go straight to Matthew's birth narrative (or rather his description of Jesus's return from Egypt), there is an obvious chronological oddity there: Right after we are told of Jesus returning from Egypt -- as a child -- the text says: “Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea” (Matt. 3:1).
But how can Jesus return from Egypt as a child, at the same time as John the Baptist starts preaching? According to Luke, they are the same age (or at most six months apart)! As I see it, the most likely explanation for this is that when Matthew was originally written, the time shift had not yet been implemented on the text, the king who died was not Herod the Great (but perhaps Herod Agrippa I), and Jesus did not return from Egypt as a child, but rather as an adult.

Now that may sound as a frivolous assertion. If it were not for the fact that there are several early non-biblical sources which state that Jesus spent years as an adult in Egypt. I will here quote only the earliest one, from Contra Celsum (where Church Father Origen quotes Celsus, who wrote ca. 175-80 CE). The sentences in quotes are from Celsus (who refers to a fictive Jew), the rest is Origen's text:

'He [the fictive Jew] accuses Him [Jesus] of having "invented his birth from a virgin" and upbraids Him with being 'born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God.”' (Cels. 1.28)

Strangely, Church Father Origen doesn't even deny that adult sojourn to Egypt, because in the next segment (1.29), he writes: "“And now, our Jesus, who is reproached with being born in a village … and being despised as the son of a poor laboring woman, and as having on account of his poverty left his native country and hired himself out in Egypt … has yet been able to shake the whole inhabited world.”

Other descriptions of, or references to, Jesus having "brought magic" from Egypt as an adult -- or being referred to as "the Egyptian" -- come from the Talmud, from Sepher Toldoth Yeshu, from Arnobius of Sicca, and from Amulo, Archbishop of Lyons ("In their own language they [the Jews] call him Ussum Hamizri, which is to say in Latin Dissipator Ægyptius [the Egyptian Destroyer/Disperser]" ; Amulo, Epistola, seu Liber contra Judaeos, ad Carolum Regem, 39).
And then we have the strange thing that the Gospels have nothing to tell us about Jesus after age 12 -- when he goes to Jerusalem -- and before age thirty, when he suddenly reappears in the story. And as he enters the synagogue in his hometown, Nazareth, people at first do not recognize him, and then only recognize him in relation to his parents and siblings, i.e. presumably as a child or young boy (Matt. 13:54-56;Luke 4:16-23; Mark 6:1-3) . Where has he been in the interim?

So, thirdly, to answer your question "If we only had the gospels of Mark and Q what evidence would you have for your theory?": I would have the close analogy between the events of the Mount of Olives, as depicted in the Gospels, and that of "the Egyptian", in Josephus. And I would have all the non-biblical evidence of Jesus's adult sojourn to Egypt, the lack of New Testament information before age 30, as well as the strange homecoming to Nazareth, apparently after a long absence.

Lena Einhorn wrote:
... The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Here we have perhaps the most glaring contradiction in the New Testament. There are only two birth narratives, and one of them says that Jesus was born 4 BCE, at the latest, whereas the other says he was born in 6 or 7 CE! To my mind, when there are obvious contradictions like that, the information should not be "discarded", but rather the opposite -- the difference means something!

Now if we first take Luke: Luke says that Jesus was born when "a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth.
This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria."

What's weird about this indicator -- the tax census under Quirinius -- is that this census is highly significant also according to Josephus, but for a completely different reason! It sparked the first organized Jewish rebellion against Rome:

• "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... All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another."

Now the strange thing about Luke using this census as an indicator of the time when Jesus was born is that he here DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THE REVOLT! So the birth of the organized Jewish rebel movement (in Josephus) has become the birth of Jesus (in Luke).

As I see it, this is one of the many examples of rebellion-related subtext in the New Testament. And it says nothing about when Jesus was actually born, but it states when his movement (which I consider to have been a rebel movement) was born.

Now if we look at the second birth narrative, that in Matthew .... whereas Luke and Acts seem to have a very consistent subtext on this matter, Mark and Matthew seem to suffer from some jumbled chronology. And if we go straight to Matthew's birth narrative (or rather his description of Jesus's return from Egypt), there is an obvious chronological oddity there: Right after we are told of Jesus returning from Egypt -- as a child -- the text says: “Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea” (Matt. 3:1).

But how can Jesus return from Egypt as a child, at the same time as John the Baptist starts preaching? According to Luke, they are the same age (or at most six months apart)! As I see it, the most likely explanation for this is that when Matthew was originally written, the time shift had not yet been implemented on the text, the king who died was not Herod the Great (but perhaps Herod Agrippa I), and Jesus did not return from Egypt as a child, but rather as an adult.

Now that may sound as a frivolous assertion. If it were not for the fact that there are several early non-biblical sources which state that Jesus spent years as an adult in Egypt. I will here quote only the earliest one, from Contra Celsum (where Church Father Origen quotes Celsus, who wrote ca. 175-80 CE). The sentences in quotes are from Celsus (who refers to a fictive Jew), the rest is Origen's text:

• " ... Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God.”' (Cels. 1.28)

Strangely, Church Father Origen doesn't even deny that adult sojourn to Egypt, because in the next segment (1.29), he writes:

• "“And now, our Jesus, who is reproached with being born in a village … and being despised as the son of a poor laboring woman and as having, on account of his poverty, left his native country and hired himself out in Egypt … has yet been able to shake the whole inhabited world.”

Other descriptions of, or references to, Jesus having "brought magic" from Egypt as an adult -- or being referred to as "the Egyptian" -- come from the Talmud, from Sepher Toldoth Yeshu; from Arnobius of Sicca; and from Amulo; Archbishop of Lyons -"In their own language they [the Jews] call him Ussum Hamizri, which is to say in Latin Dissipator Ægyptius [the Egyptian Destroyer/Disperser]"; Amulo, Epistola, seu Liber contra Judaeos, ad Carolum Regem, 39.

The Egyptian 'mystery religions' were increasingly spreading around the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st and 2nd centuries, though they and their spread are hardly ever -if ever- mentioned in the milieu of Jewish, Greek, and Roman dynamics of those times. The cults of Osiris, Isis, & Horus; and Serapis. Their followers get generalized & categorized as pagans or Gentiles. These religions weren't necessarily spread by expatriates, either: more by shipping into key ports and metropolises around those ports. Tacitus and Seutonius recorded Vespasian as interacting with the cult of Serapis in Egypt (Histories 4; Seutonius's vita Vepasian 7 (in The Lives of the Caesars; there was a Basilides there, too). Serapis was supposedly known as Serapis Chrestus. Hadrian had a serapaeum.

Aspects of those religions and their key entities/figures could have been borrowed and written into the Jesus narratives.

Perhaps moving Jesus narratives into an early 1st century time-slot over-rode and/or conflated more than the start of Jewish zealousness instigated by the Census under Quirinius.
________________________________________________________

Lena Einhorn wrote:
And then we have the strange thing that the Gospels have nothing to tell us about Jesus after age 12 -- when he goes to Jerusalem -- and before age thirty, when he suddenly reappears in the story. And as he enters the synagogue in his hometown, Nazareth, people at first do not recognize him, and then only recognize him in relation to his parents and siblings, i.e. presumably as a child or young boy (Matt 13:54-56; Luke 4:16-23; Mark 6:1-3) . Where has he been in the interim?

People not recognizing Him is a similar scenario to what was narrated after the resurrection.

.

Lena Einhorn wrote:…

So, thirdly, to answer your question "If we only had the gospels of Mark and Q what evidence would you have for your theory?": I would have the close analogy between the events of the Mount of Olives, as depicted in the Gospels, and that of "the Egyptian", in Josephus. And I would have all the non-biblical evidence of Jesus's adult sojourn to Egypt, the lack of New Testament information before age 30, as well as the strange homecoming to Nazareth, apparently after a long absence.

Our earliest two sources (three if you include Paul) have nothing about Jesus’ birth. Matthew and Luke both fill this vacuum in their own way but you take as historical what supports your theory without discussing why the most likely explanation is that both contain no history. Also you treat as historical Luke’s fiction that Jesus and Mary were cousins born within 9 months of each other. Are you aware of the case for these not being historical and do you have a critique of these cases?

It seems unlikely that Origen would want to contradict Matthew’s fiction that Jesus stayed in Egypt for a while and so has no interest in counting Celsus’ assertion that Jesus was in Egypt. What Origen writes as his summary is “I give it as my opinion that all these things worthily harmonize with the predictions that Jesus is the Son of God.” He goes on to say that the birth story is a falsehood and that Jesus was born of a virgin, just as in Matthew’s fiction. Therefore if you accept Origen and Matthew’s view that Jesus went to Egypt logically you should accept the Virgin birth!

The stories told by Jews about Jesus are no more reliable than those told by Christians. Before accepting any they need to be examined criterially.

In Mk 6:1-3 the people of Jesus’ country (most likely not Nazareth) or home-land DO recognise Jesus and list his brothers while saying that his sisters are there with them. I expect some would say that he has been away being a disciple of John the Baptist, but he might just have been travelling round Galilee or he could have been working on a building site some miles from his native town or city. You are reading into it an extended absence, but that is not even implied in the text.

Therefore if we reject the non-biblical stories of Jesus’ sojourn in Egypt as being based on the fiction of Matthew it seems you are left with Jesus’ arrest on the Mount of Olives as your only evidence, but I thought Josephus doesn’t have “the Egyptian” arrested and don’t you use that as part of your theory of who Paul is?

To MrMacSon and Michael BG:
I have said this a few times in this thread, but I'll say it again: when alternative explanations are suggested for each separate element in a multi-component parallel between the NT and other sources (mine or anybody elses) this is of course perfectly all right. But there are ALWAYS alternative explanations to each element. The question is if these are brought forth to elucidate or obscure, and if they produce a scenario more or less complete and consistent than the scenario they are brought forth to debunk.
If I am describing a city where there is a Statue of Liberty, where the central part is an island, where there is a big urban park, where the location is the western hemisphere amd the main language is English, it is perfectly valid to suggest that:
1. The Statue of Liberty is by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris
2. The central island is found in Stockholm
3. The big park is Fairmount Park in Philadelphia
4. The western hemisphere location is Rio de Janeiro
5. And the city where the main language is English is Canberra
But if we look at all the elements at the same time, it makes much more sense to think of New York.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, I'm just trying to make my point. I think the question we all have to ask ourselves when we look at different scenarios presented -- especially when the topic is close to our heart -- is whether we are curious enough to be fully open to the new idea. Or if debunking is our knee-jerk reaction.
And yes, I of course have to ask myself the same question.

Based on the inerrant bible of Josephus we have the following candidates :
Antigonus
The cancelled Passover of 4 AD
The Egyptian of 40 AD
the chief of Masada 73 AD

Did I forget anyone?

Are you listing candidates for the historical Jesus that various people have suggested? Or are you asking my opinion?

Perhaps we should also consider that the name of the historical Jesus was Jesus.

Indeed

Lena Einhorn wrote:I believe the whole reason for an implemented time shift is to do with either the Gospel authors or later editors having read Josephus (and possibly Justus of Tiberias), and realizing they have parallel -- and competing -- narratives. Eliminating these could only be done through a time shift of the NT text. As is often discussed, much points to the author of Luke/Acts having read Antiquities by Josephus, something which, if true, would put the authoring of Luke/Acts in the 90s at the earliest. As I've mentioned before, I believe Luke/Acts are written with the time shift already implemented, whereas Mark and Matthew, which have some crude chronological mistakes, where time shifted retroactively.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2525&p=56901#p56901

Lena Einhorn wrote:The reason d) (the answer to "why the time shift?"): If Jesus, in reality, was not exactly the kind of person that the Gospels portray -- if, for instance, he was a rebel leader, actively partaking in, and inspiring, the violent upheaval of the times, rather than merely a peaceloving spiritual leader -- there may have been an impetus for those writing or editing the New Testament to eliminate all competing narratives of his existence. The easiest way to do this -- and still tell the story -- would have been to move him to another era than when the historical sources claim he was active. This, however, would by necessity come with a cost: making Jesus into a more or less ahistorical person.

Could the reason also have something to do with the famous Tacitean statement in Histories 5.9.2? Sub Tiberio quies. Perhaps the time of Tiberius (and Pilate) was chosen for Jesus precisely because it was relatively free of messianic claimants and other major troublemakers, thus contributing to the casting of Jesus as a more peaceable figure than he really was...?

ETA: And I have previously suggested that perhaps Pontius Pilate made it into some of the early creeds and related statements (such as 1 Timothy 6.13) precisely as a way of quashing or redirecting alternate times and places for Jesus: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1673&p=37932#p37932.