Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 6:14 pm

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 5:25 pm 3. How does James Carlton Paget (2001) address Olson (1999) ?

ok, he seems to give Ken a fair hearing (in a big article). Here are the passages pertaining to Ken's comments about the TF (there are prior comments in Carlton Paget's article about Ken's comments about Ant XX.200) -

Paget gave my 1999 paper a hearing. Whether it is fair hearing, or a good one, is another matter. I'll respond to some of his criticisms here and pass over the parts where he recaps me without misconstrual or explicit disagreement.


Note Paget's use of 'what he [Eusebius] chooses to emphasize' (i.e., make an external comment on) as I will explain further below.


The idea that Jesus attracted both Jews and Hellenes (Greeks/Polytheists/Gentiles) during his ministry is historically problematic for Paget and other modern scholars. It was not historically problematic for Eusebius. It's what he believed. I have documented this with many examples in the 'Eusebian Reading' paper (106-107 and associated footnotes).

Here's what Eusebius says following his citation of he Testimonium in Demonstratio 3.5:

Thus the whole slander against his disciples is destroyed, when by their evidence, and also apart from their evidence, it has to be confessed that many myriads of Jews and Gentiles were brought under His yoke by Jesus the Christ of God through the miracles that he performed
Eusebius Demonstratio 3.5.

The gospels ['their (the disciples') evidence] show that Jesus won over many myriads of Jews and Gentiles, and the Testimonium ['apart from their evidence'] backs up the gospel's claim. But Paget assumes that Eusebius could not have understood the gospels to be saying that, so apparently he has misrepresented his own understanding of the gospels in order to back up what the Testimonium says. That is a nonsensical reading of the text. Eusebius thinks that the gospels show that Jesus won over both many Jews and many Gentiles and that the Testimonium backs that up, just as he says.


Paget thinks that, if Eusebius had written the Testimonium himself, with its explicit statement 'This one was the Christ', it's surprising that he doesn't *emphasize* it, by which Paget means Eusebius should have made an explicit comment pointing it out to his readers (just in case they missed it the first time he said it?).

I think it perhaps a tad more likely that Eusebius did not expect his readers to miss that one. It's reasonably self-explanatory.

Sozomen, writing a Church History about a century after (and acknowledging dependence on) Eusebius, discusses the Testimonium in the second paragraph of the book:

Josephus, the son of Matthias, also who was a priest, and was most distinguished among Jews and Romans, may be regarded as a noteworthy witness to the truth concerning Christ ; for he hesitates to call Him a man since He wrought marvelous works, and was a teacher of truthful doctrines, but openly calls him Christ; that He was condemned to the death of the cross, and appeared alive again the third day. Nor was Josephus ignorant of numberless other wonderful predictions uttered beforehand by the holy prophets concerning Christ. He further testifies that Christ brought over many to Himself both Greeks and Jews, who continued to love Him, and that the people named after Him had not become extinct. It appears to me that in narrating these things, he all but proclaims that Christ, by comparison of works, is God. As if struck by the miracle, he ran, somehow, a middle course, assailing in no way those who believed in Jesus, but rather agreeing with them.
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26021.htm

So Sozomen thought Josephus was not a Christian but a Jew who happened to agree with those who believed in Jesus. I think Sozomen fully took on board the message Eusebius was sending without Eusebius having to make explicit interpretive comments to help him along. (It's preposterous, but that doesn't mean people didn't believe it).

Paget's approach has been picked up by Whealey and even, to some extent, Steve Mason. They think we can ignore the content of the Testimonium itself and judge what Eusebius thought important in it purely by the external comments he makes on it. Whealey particularly seems to presuppose that if Eusebius had written the Testimonium he would have written an extensive external commentary on it explaining all the ways it backed up what he was arguing. I can't imagine that that would do anything other than direct suspicion at Eusebius for an already suspect passage.


This is not what Feldman argued, nor what I followed him in arguing. Feldman said ancient writers often vary their wording when quoting themselves. I did not attribute the different wordings of the Testimonium in Eusebius three works that cite it to changes made by subsequent scribes.


Paget's first point is mistaken. Eusebius uses εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν six times outside of the Testimonium: Preparation for the Gospel 1.3.10, Demonstration of the Gospel 4.16.3; 9.3.7; Ecclesiastical History 2.1.7, Commentaria in Psalmos PG 23 col. 1305, Generalis elementaria introductio 168.15 (p. 45 n. 44 in 'Eusebian Reading'). I cited Eusebius several times using εἰς ἔτι νῦν along with the variant εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν at Ecclesiastical History 2.1.7 in the 1999 paper (p. 312 n.14) and Paget missed it. I was careful to cite εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν specifically in the 2013 paper.

I do not know if Paget's second point is correct or not. Eusebius uses εἰς ἔτι νῦν with an occasional τε or και inserted into it something over 200 times in the Greek texts of his surviving works. I haven't gone through all of them to see if they are used with a negated aorist. I don't think it would do any good if I did. Paget (and Whealey is worse about this) could always raise the bar by adding further qualifiers that would have to be met to qualify as parallel between the Testimonium and the rest of Eusebius' writings. [Whealey, for instance, knows that Eusebius does use the word 'pleasure' in a positive sense, but claims that he doesn't use it in a *in the dative* in a positive sense. I found an example of Eusebius using pleasure in the dative and cited it in the 2013 paper. But my larger point is she's just making up criteria to disqualify examples from parallel uses of language in Eusebius. Why should the parallel have to be in a specific case?]


Review of Paget's six points:

(1) is mistaken. I have argued in the 2013 paper that Eusebius reaches the conclusion that Jesus was the Christ (and not merely a wise man) after he gives three pieces of evidence that Jesus did things which were foretold about the Christ in prophecy.
(2) is circular. Where the text of the Testimonium strikes an aggressively Christian note, Paget and others are more certain it is a Christian addition. This does not show that the less obviously Christian parts of the text are Josephan. This was the reason I showed that if you rewrite one of the summaries of Jesus career in Acts (Acts 2:22-24) by removing the most obviously Christian parts, you arrive at a more neutral statement (as Paget noted). But this doesn't mean that Acts 2:22-24 was originally a neutral statement that was later embellished with more overtly Christian additions.
(3) Yes, why not? Paget is making an argument from silence. As I argued in the 1999 paper, 22 of 27 documents in the NT don't mention John. Eusebius' focus is on the nature of Christ and of Christians. They are a new nation with new name, distinct from the Jews and Greeks, made up of those welcome the truth gladly, as opposed to those who remain Jews and Greeks (who, by implication do not welcome the truth, but resist it). John the Baptist is peripheral. He isn't mentioned in the Testimonium (which Eusebius first quotes in Demonstratio 3.5), nor anywhere else in Book III of the Demonstratio.
(4) Norden took the Testimonium to be a complete interpolation based on it not fitting into the sequence of disturbances during the reign of Pilate in Judea. Scholars who want to retain authenticity reversed the argument and said it's probably not an interpolation because the context is potentially negative. No one observed that the context was negative before 1600 when the authenticity of the text came into question and they had to come up with reasons to defend it.
(5) I do not believe this to be the case. I would have to see the specific evidences. A number of scholars have pointed to language that might seem disparaging in the mouth of Josephus, but the same language does not sound disparaging in the mouth of Eusebius, and, again, we do not have a record that anyone saw any of the language of the Testimonium as disparaging until after 1600, when they had to come up with arguments for authenticity.
(6) I have addressed this point in my Eusebian reading paper from 2013. Eusebius (as Lactantius was doing and as Augustine would later do) is responding to Porphry's claim that Jesus was a wise man of the Hebrews who the Christians had mistakenly taken to be divine.

If people want to be fooled, it's very difficult to unfool them.

Best,

Ken

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:12 am

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 6:14 pm

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 5:25 pm 3. How does James Carlton Paget (2001) address Olson (1999) ?

ok, he seems to give Ken a fair hearing (in a big article). Here are the passages pertaining to Ken's comments about the TF (there are prior comments in Carlton Paget's article about Ken's comments about Ant XX.200) -

Paget gave my 1999 paper a hearing. Whether it is fair hearing, or a good one, is another matter. I'll respond to some of his criticisms here and pass over the parts where he recaps me without misconstrual or explicit disagreement.

"While it is true that Eusebius' citation of the TF occurs in the context of an attempt to argue for the genuineness of Jesus' miracles, it is notable that what he chooses to emphasize from the TF are not the phrases which Olson seems to put so much store by. Rather Eusebius picks up on the TF's statement that Jesus attracted to himself many Jews and many Greeks to prove that "he must evidently have had some extraordinary power beyond that of other men."

Note Paget's use of 'what he [Eusebius] chooses to emphasize' (i.e., make an external comment on) as I will explain further below.

"In fact Eusebius appears to realise that such an assertion about Jesus is problematical, not least because it points to a reality which did not pertain either at the time Eusebius was writing or in Jesus' ministry. Hence he seeks to support the assertion by reference to the Acts of the Apostles and what was known about Christianity up to the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Moreover, although the passage appears in an almost identical context in the Theophania to that of Demonstratio, the same words are emphasized. If Eusebius was the forger of the TF why would he have chosen not to emphasize those parts of the passage which Olson highlights as central to his concerns, emphasizing instead a part of the TF which appeared historically problematic?

The idea that Jesus attracted both Jews and Hellenes (Greeks/Polytheists/Gentiles) during his ministry is historically problematic for Paget and other modern scholars. It was not historically problematic for Eusebius. It's what he believed. I have documented this with many examples in the 'Eusebian Reading' paper (106-107 and associated footnotes).

Here's what Eusebius says following his citation of he Testimonium in Demonstratio 3.5:

Thus the whole slander against his disciples is destroyed, when by their evidence, and also apart from their evidence, it has to be confessed that many myriads of Jews and Gentiles were brought under His yoke by Jesus the Christ of God through the miracles that he performed
Eusebius Demonstratio 3.5.

The gospels ['their (the disciples') evidence] show that Jesus won over many myriads of Jews and Gentiles, and the Testimonium ['apart from their evidence'] backs up the gospel's claim. But Paget assumes that Eusebius could not have understood the gospels to be saying that, so apparently he has misrepresented his own understanding of the gospels in order to back up what the Testimonium says. That is a nonsensical reading of the text. Eusebius thinks that the gospels show that Jesus won over both many Jews and many Gentiles and that the Testimonium backs that up, just as he says.

"The citation of the passage in Hist. eccl. (1.11.7-8) is more obscure84 and appears in the midst of a defence of the Gospel chronology against the contradictory claims of the so-called Memoranda, an early fourth century anti-Christian work, attributed to the Caesar Maximin Daia (Hist. eccl. 9.5.1). Strikingly, Eusebius does not seek to emphasize any particular part of it. That he quotes it as if it followed the passage on John the Baptist in Josephus is not evidence of a forgery on his part, but rather of a strong attachment to canonical order, or a desire to refute the chronology of the Memoranda. That Eusebius nowhere emphasizes Josephus' apparent endorsement of the messianic status of Jesus also seems odd if he is its 'fons et origo'.

Paget thinks that, if Eusebius had written the Testimonium himself, with its explicit statement 'This one was the Christ', it's surprising that he doesn't *emphasize* it, by which Paget means Eusebius should have made an explicit comment pointing it out to his readers (just in case they missed it the first time he said it?).

I think it perhaps a tad more likely that Eusebius did not expect his readers to miss that one. It's reasonably self-explanatory.

Sozomen, writing a Church History about a century after (and acknowledging dependence on) Eusebius, discusses the Testimonium in the second paragraph of the book:

Josephus, the son of Matthias, also who was a priest, and was most distinguished among Jews and Romans, may be regarded as a noteworthy witness to the truth concerning Christ ; for he hesitates to call Him a man since He wrought marvelous works, and was a teacher of truthful doctrines, but openly calls him Christ; that He was condemned to the death of the cross, and appeared alive again the third day. Nor was Josephus ignorant of numberless other wonderful predictions uttered beforehand by the holy prophets concerning Christ. He further testifies that Christ brought over many to Himself both Greeks and Jews, who continued to love Him, and that the people named after Him had not become extinct. It appears to me that in narrating these things, he all but proclaims that Christ, by comparison of works, is God. As if struck by the miracle, he ran, somehow, a middle course, assailing in no way those who believed in Jesus, but rather agreeing with them.
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26021.htm

So Sozomen thought Josephus was not a Christian but a Jew who happened to agree with those who believed in Jesus. I think Sozomen fully took on board the message Eusebius was sending without Eusebius having to make explicit interpretive comments to help him along. (It's preposterous, but that doesn't mean people didn't believe it).

Paget's approach has been picked up by Whealey and even, to some extent, Steve Mason. They think we can ignore the content of the Testimonium itself and judge what Eusebius thought important in it purely by the external comments he makes on it. Whealey particularly seems to presuppose that if Eusebius had written the Testimonium he would have written an extensive external commentary on it explaining all the ways it backed up what he was arguing. I can't imagine that that would do anything other than direct suspicion at Eusebius for an already suspect passage.

¹⁰⁹ See Wallace-Hadrill ibid., 359. Olson 1999, 313, following Feldman, argued that the Eusebian textual variants could be explained away by attributing them to subsequent scribes (regarding the TF as a forgery written by Eusebius, he must argue such a case). This, I think, can possibly be argued for the reading τἀληθῆ σεβομένων, but is less easy to argue in the case of τις.

This is not what Feldman argued, nor what I followed him in arguing. Feldman said ancient writers often vary their wording when quoting themselves. I did not attribute the different wordings of the Testimonium in Eusebius three works that cite it to changes made by subsequent scribes.

εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν Olson notes that Eusebius uses the phrase εἰς ἔτι νῦν quite frequently, although the phrase is not precisely witnessed in this form in Josephus. Two points need to be made. First, nowhere in Eusebius' works do we witness the phrase εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν. Secondly, like Josephus before him, whenever Eusebius uses the phrase εἰς ἔτι νῦν, he does not use a verb in the aorist, preferring, logically, a verb in the present. In other words, Olson's reference to Eusebius will not explain all of the oddities of this phrase or the sentence in which it appears.

Paget's first point is mistaken. Eusebius uses εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν six times outside of the Testimonium: Preparation for the Gospel 1.3.10, Demonstration of the Gospel 4.16.3; 9.3.7; Ecclesiastical History 2.1.7, Commentaria in Psalmos PG 23 col. 1305, Generalis elementaria introductio 168.15 (p. 45 n. 44 in 'Eusebian Reading'). I cited Eusebius several times Eusebius used εἰς ἔτι νῦν along with the variant εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν Ecclesiastical History 2.1.7 in the 1999 paper (p. 312 n.14) and Paget missed it. I was careful to cite εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν specifically in the 2013 paper.

I do not know if Paget's second point is correct or not. Eusebius uses εἰς ἔτι νῦν with an occasional τε or και inserted into it something over 200 times in the Greek texts of his surviving works. I haven't gone through all of them o see if they are used with a negated aorist. I don't think it would do any good if I did. Paget (and Whealey is worse about this) could always raise the bar by adding further qualifiers that would have to be met to qualify as parallel between the Testimonium and the rest of Eusebius' writings. [Whealey, for instance, knows that Eusebius does use the word 'pleasure' in a positive sense, but claims that he doesn't use it *in the dative* . I found an example of Eusebius using pleasure in the dative and cited it in the 2013 paper. But my larger point is she's just making up criteria to disqualify examples from parallel uses of language in Eusebius. Why would the parallel have to be in a specific case?]

Six observations which broadly relate to the content of the TF could be seen as possible defences of its existence in an emended form:
(1) The asyndetic ὁ Χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν appears as a somewhat intrusive phrase in the passage ...
2) Where we can be certain of the existence of Christian additions to Josephus as well as glosses, they strike a more aggressively Christian note
3) Would an interpolator intent upon constructing the TF have left the story of John the Baptist in the form in which we find it and in the order in which we find it, that is, following the account of Jesus?
(4) The context in which the passage is located carries with it potentially negative implications, as Norden and others have demonstrated.
(5) There are oddnesses in the content of the received text which make it difficult to imagine that all of it is an interpolation.
(6) It is difficult to find any obvious context in which such an interpolation would have arisen. Olson's attempt to construct a context in which a Eusebian interpolation seems plausible is unconvincing. Feldman's view that a forgery may have been useful in arguments about whether Jesus existed is anachronistic. A more likely scenario would be a polemical or apologetic one in which Christians were seeking independent witnesses for their claims about Christ ...

Review of Paget's six points:

(1) is mistaken. I have argued in the 2013 paper that Eusebius reaches the conclusion that Jesus was the Christ (and not merely a wise man) after he gives three pieces of evidence thatJesus did things that were foretold about the Christ in prophecy.
(2) is circular. Where the text of the Testimonium strikes an aggressively Christian note, Paget and others are more certain it is a Christian addition. This does not show that the less obviously Christian parts of the text are Josephan. This was the reason I showed you rewrite one of the summaries of Jesus career in Acts by removing the most obviously Christian parts and arriving at a more neutral statement (as Paget noted).
(3) Yes, why not? Paget is making an argument from silence. As I argued in the 1999 paper, 22 of 27 documents in the NT don't mention John. Eusebius' focus is on the nature of Christ and of Christians. They are a new nation with new name, distinct from the Jews and Greeks, made up of those welcome the truth gladly, as opposed to those who remain Jews and Greeks (who, by implication do not welcome the truth, but resist it). John the Baptist is peripheral.He isn't mentioned in the Testimonium, nor anywhere else in Book III of Eusebius' Demonstratio.
(4) Norden took the Testimonium to be a complete interpolation based on it not fitting into the sequence of disturbances during the reign of Pilate in Judea. Scholars who want to retain authenticity reversed the argument and said it's probably not an interpolation because the context is potentially negative. No one observed that the context was negative before 1600 when the authenticity of the text came into question and they had to come up with reasons to defend it.
(5) I do not believe this to be the case. I would have to see the specific evidences. A number of scholars have pointed to language that might seem disparaging in the mouth of Josephus, but the same language does not sound disparaging in the mouth of Eusebius, and, again, we do not have a record that anyone saw any of the language of the Testimonium as disparaging until after 1600, when they had to come up with arguments for authenticity.
(6) I have addressed this point in my Eusebian reading paper from 2013. Eusebius (as Lactantius was doing and as Augustine would later do) is responding to Porphry's claim that Jesus was a wise man of the Hebrews who the Christians had mistakenly taken to be divine.

If people want to be fooled, it's very difficult to unfool them.

Best,

Ken

Ken.
What do you understand is the payload, as it were, contained within your Eusebius theory?.

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 6:14 pm

MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Mar 13, 2022 5:25 pm 3. How does James Carlton Paget (2001) address Olson (1999) ?

ok, he seems to give Ken a fair hearing (in a big article). Here are the passages pertaining to Ken's comments about the TF (there are prior comments in Carlton Paget's article about Ken's comments about Ant XX.200) -

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:12 am Paget gave my 1999 paper a hearing. Whether it is fair hearing, or a good one, is another matter.

Yes, fair comment. I meant he mentioned you a fair bit. I found some of it disingenuous.

I very much appreciate your comments and the chance to digest them.

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:12 am Best,

Ken

Just a pat on the back here

Lovely how the criteria are redefined, it's always beneficial to change the rules when the game is not going as planned

I've got nothing to nitpick Ken. Only one question:

"A more likely scenario would be a polemical or apologetic one in which Christians were seeking independent witnesses for their claims about Christ ..."

Why did Paget propose that?

maryhelena wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:13 pm Ken.
What do you understand is the payload, as it were, contained within your Eusebius theory?.

My theory that Josephus did not mention Jesus, alongside my theory that there was no Q, but that Luke used Mark and Matthew and John used all the synoptics, would mean that we really cannot use the criterion of multiple independent attestation to confirm that the narrative of Jesus' ministry as given in the gospels was at least basically correct in outline.

Best,

Ken

mlinssen wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 1:43 pm

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 10:12 am Best,

Ken

Just a pat on the back here

Lovely how the criteria are redefined, it's always beneficial to change the rules when the game is not going as planned

I've got nothing to nitpick Ken. Only one question:

"A more likely scenario would be a polemical or apologetic one in which Christians were seeking independent witnesses for their claims about Christ ..."

Why did Paget propose that?

Paget says:

Olson's attempt to construct a context in which a Eusebian interpolation seems plausible is unconvincing. Feldman's view that a forgery may have been useful in arguments about whether Jesus existed is anachronistic. A more likely scenario would be a polemical or apologetic one in which Christians were seeking independent witnesses for their claims about Christ. (Paget, Some Observations, 602).

I think Paget's comment about 'a more likely scenario' is directed at Feldman's view that the Testimonium would have been useful in debates about whether Jesus existed. I think Paget is right about that - proving that Jesus existed is not Eusebius's concern. But his 'more likely scenario' is in fact what I have been proposing.

Best,

Ken

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 4:43 pm

maryhelena wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:13 pm Ken.
What do you understand is the payload, as it were, contained within your Eusebius theory?.

My theory that Josephus did not mention Jesus, (snip) ..........................would mean that we really cannot use the criterion of multiple independent attestation to confirm that the narrative of Jesus' ministry as given in the gospels was at least basically correct in outline.

Best,

Ken

A 'criterion of multiple independent attestation' cannot turn water into wine. It cannot change a narrative document, about a man named Jesus executed by a Roman agent in the first century, into a historical document. That Eusebius, (and other Christians) believed the gospel Jesus narrative to be a historical document simply reflects their naivety. Your theory - Eusebius interpolated the whole cloth TF into Josephus' Antiquities - would amount to an attempt by Eusebius to establish Josephus as an 'independent attestation' that the gospel Jesus narrative was a historical account of Jesus. The gospel Jesus narrative stands or falls on it's own merits: Born of a virgin, walking on water and raising the dead - and defeats death itself - is not a historical document about a historical man.

The gospel Jesus narrative is an allegory, primarily a political allegory related to Jewish/Hasmonean history. Viewed from that perspective - Josephus has every reason to support the gospel Jesus allegorical narrative in his historical writings. Josephus has Jesus, John and James - great support for the gospel narrative. Josephus is not supporting the historicity of Jesus, John and James - he is supporting the gospel narrative. The gospel Jesus story is a Jewish story - Josephus is the Jewish historian of the late first century. It is surely mistaken to give Josephus a Eusebius pass card - to let him stand aside from involvement in the historical grounding of what became an early christian movement.

Unfortunately, the payload of your Eusebius theory is, in effect, to give Josephus a Eusebius pass card. It allows Josephus to stand clear from involvement with the gospel Jesus narrative. The core of the TF is not Eusebius, it is Josephus writing. Consequently, it is Josephus, not Eusebius, that needs to be put in the dock. Josephus verse Eusebius on the TF - a man steeped in Jewish/Hasmonean history verse a man attempting to turn a narrative about that history into a historical document ...I know where my money would be placed.

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 4:43 pm My theory that Josephus did not mention Jesus, alongside my theory that there was no Q, but that Luke used Mark and Matthew and John used all the synoptics, would mean that we really cannot use the criterion of multiple independent attestation to confirm that the narrative of Jesus' ministry as given in the gospels was at least basically correct in outline.

I respect your hard work, but if that were your goal, then you may be working too hard.

Reasoning about dependency is the core of probabilistic deliberation*. Whether Josephus mentioned Jesus, and if so, what he wrote, is a worthy topic for investigation and hard work. But as to the stated goal, suppose it turned out that yes, Josephus did mention Jesus and wrote "something like" the received text.

How could that "something" be assumed to be an "independent attestation" of the outline of the gospel ministry (= conditionally independent of Christian literature given that, or on the assumption that, Christians' Jesus was a real person who actually lived and was enthusiastically revered by his survivors)?

By inspection, TF or TF-lite is an outline of the gospel ministry (minus a connection with John the Baptist). Its author was well versed and clearly interested in events of the same time and place as the setting of the gospels. By hypothesis, it was written in the last decade of the First Century, when at least a proto- version of gMark existed, according to widely held views.

In the absence of evidence bearing on the point, (conditionally) independent attestation can be nothing except an assumption, and a dodgy one at that.

Q is an even clearer case. Even assuming that some collection of wisdom sayings existed for Matthew and Luke to use, the only thing that we observe that would connect the collection to Jesus is Matthew's and Luke's attribution of its content to Jesus. (That the original version of such a collection would include the claim "Jesus of Galilee said all of the following" is an additional assumption.)

That is a sterling example of conditional dependence between pieces of evidence, or would be if we had the collection, which we don't. [And as with TF, whether there was a collection is a worthy question in its own right. I am not disparaging your work. I am expressing reservations about how your excellent-in-its-own-right effort relates to your stated goal.]

------
* Reasoning about conditionally independent pieces of evidence is easy, and so I understand why Carrier emphasizes that situation (= assumes that all observations are conditionally independent whenever he applies Bayes' formula). But I also think that Carrier's choice accounts for many scholars' sense that Bayes as revealed by Carrier adds little to what they're doing anyway, or even makes analysis more difficult because of all those numbers which Carrier feels a need to burden his reader with.

@ABudhist why do you doubt the ben Damneus argument ?

There seems to be a super simple sequence of events here:

"called the Christ ?" is a sidenote

So the original just refers to James the brother of Jesus ... and the Jesus is qualified by the end of the passage where it talks about Jesus ben Damneus.

So without that phrase it appears to be a wholly consistent passage where Ananus (unlawfully) punishes James and his brother Jesus ben Damneus is compensated by being given the High Priesthood.

I have heard (but don't have a reference) that sibling compensation was not an uncommon way of settling an unjust action - does anyone have references for this happening (other than here!)

jbbaehr wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 4:18 am @ABudhist why do you doubt the ben Damneus argument ?

There seems to be a super simple sequence of events here:

"called the Christ ?" is a sidenote

So the original just refers to James the brother of Jesus ... and the Jesus is qualified by the end of the passage where it talks about Jesus ben Damneus.

So without that phrase it appears to be a wholly consistent passage where Ananus (unlawfully) punishes James and his brother Jesus ben Damneus is compensated by being given the High Priesthood.

I have heard (but don't have a reference) that sibling compensation was not an uncommon way of settling an unjust action - does anyone have references for this happening (other than here!)

Welcome to the forum!