Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

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I'm saying that Paul is not relevant to this discussion.

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So you don't care if he wrote 1 Cor, II Cor, and Galatians around 55 A.D.?Well, then can I say Paul said Jesus was "born of a woman" and had a "mother"?It does not matter, the interpretation?

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Still waiting for someone to provide us with independent, contemporary historical evidence for the Jesus of the Bible. Instead of that evidence we get the kitchen sink of crap that does not have anything to do with the historicity of Jesus. It doesn't matter if a few dozen people in 100 CE thought he was a historic figure. Even if everything Josephus supposedly wrote about Jesus was actually written by Josephus(we know it could not have because an observant Jew would never refer to anyone being the Messiah) it is not evidence of a historical Jesus. Just evidence that 70 years after the supposed death of the dude people thought he was a historical character.

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Josephus said that James was "brother of Jesus called Christ" so the mention of "called Christ" proves he did not say "called Christ"?Because Josephus would not want to mention a false Messiah?Josephus lived in the small city of Jerusalem during the early 60s.

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None of what LMN has thrown against the wall, and it is a lot, is historical evidence for existence of Jesus.

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Especially when you have an excuse for erasing (or ignoring) everything you don't like.

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There is no mention of Jesus in the historical record. None. We have some anonymous writings that are post 70CE that present fantastical stories, but there is nothing to corroborate them. The earliest writer in Christianity, Paul, presents a nonhistorical Jesus. He tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, he talks about the mystical Jesus.

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Paul essentially says he talked to a dead man's spirit.Paul said Jesus had a "brother" and that he was "born of a woman", but I am sure you have 5-6 different ways to explain that away.

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We know very little about this Paul. He is a shadow in the historical record. No other writers of that time period mention him. Then again why would an itinerant preacher of a minor mystery cult be mentioned by anyone of substance. We do not know where he was born, when he died or anyone else in the historical record that actually knew him or wrote about him. We do not even know his name. All we have is the book of Acts, which is not a historical document. Nothing in it can be corroborated by outside sources.

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There are Paul's Letters.But that is "The Bible"There are extra Biblical documents from the first century.I Clement (Clement of Rome's Epistle to the Corinthians)

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THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY
(Ed. J. HENDERSON)
THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS I
LCL 24

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THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS I CLEMENT, II CLEMENT, IGNATIUS , POLYCARP, DIDACHE
(Harvard University Press, 2003)

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p.16

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The "First Letter of Clement" is a misnomer, as no other letter from the author survives: "Second Clement," which is not a letter, comes from a different hand (see Introduction to Second Clement). Moreover, the present letter does not claim to be written by Clement, who, in fact, is never mentioned in its text.

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The letter is addressed by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, and is written in order to deal with problems that had arisen there. Although allusions to the situation are found already in chapter 1, its full nature is not made clear until nearly two-thirds of the way into the letter (esp. chs. 4 2 - 4 4 , 4 7 ) . The church in Corinth had experienced a turnover in leadership, which the author of the letter considered a heinous grab for power by a group of jealous upstarts, who had deposed the ruling group of presbyters and assumed control of the church for them selves. The letter is a strong "request... for peace and harmony" (63:2), which upbraids the Corinthian church for its disunity, convicts members of the guilty party of the error of their ways, and urges them to return the deposed presbyters to their positions of authority

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p.20-

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Even though the letter claims to be written by the "church... residing in Rome," it has from early times been attributed to Clement, a leader of the Roman church near the end of the first century. In his celebrated church his tory, Eusebius sets forth the tradition, earlier found in the writings of the third-century church Father Origen, that this Clement was the companion of the apostle Paul mentioned in Philippians 4:3 (Eccl. Hist. 3.4.15; see Origen Comm. Jn. 6.36). Some of the early traditions claim that Clement was the second bishop of Rome, ordained by Peter himself (Tertullian, Prescription 32); more commonly it was thought that he was the third, following Linus and Anacletus (thus Irenaeus in Agst. Heresies 3.3.1 and Eusebius Eccl. Hist. 3.4.21).

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The first reference to any Roman Christian named Clement is by a near contemporary, Hermas, author of the Shepherd (see Introduction to the Shepherd of Hermas), who is instructed to send two copies of a book to Rome, one of them for "Clement" who was then to distribute it to churches in other locations, "for that is his commission" {Shepherd 8.2). This Clement, then, appears to have had an official role in the church, at least in Hermas' time (first part of the second century), as some kind of secretary in charge of foreign correspondence.

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As early as the middle of the second century it was claimed by Dionysius of Corinth that Clement had written this epistle to the Corinthians, which, he indicated, continued to be read in his own day during regular church gatherings (ca. 170 CE; also claimed, about the same time, by Hegessipus). This tradition is followed, then, by Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. 4.23) and down through the ages; it is evidenced in the surviving manuscripts of the letter as well.

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The only complete text of the epistle in Greek gives its title (in a subscription) as "The First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians." It is also ascribed to Clement in the other Greek, Latin, and Syriac manuscripts. Some have argued that this Clement was a freedman of the Roman consul T. Flavius Clemens, an aristocrat of the Flavian family who was executed by his cousin, the emperor Domitian, for "atheism," possibly referring to an association with Judaism (see esp. the full account in Lightfoot and the more recent discussion in Jeffers).

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There are reasons, however, to doubt the traditional ascription. Nowhere is Clement mentioned in the letter, let alone named as its author. I f the bishop of Rome himself had written the letter, one might expect him to assert his authority by mentioning his position. More to the point, even the tradition that there was a single bishop over the church in Rome at this time appears to be a later idea, advanced by (later) orthodox Christians concerned to show that their own lines of authority could be extended back through a succession of bishops to the apostles themselves, the so-called "apostolic succession."

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As noted, Hermas, who was also from Rome, nowhere calls Clement, or any one else in his day, the bishop of Rome. Moreover, 1 Clement itself uses the terms "presbyter" and "bishop" inter changeably (ch. 44), making it appear that a distinct office of "bishop" as the leader of the church presbyters had not yet appeared.

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It is striking that some years later the bishop of Antioch, Ignatius (see Introduction to the Letters of Ignatius), could write the church in Rome and give no indication that there was a single bishop in charge. Some scholars have gone even further, asserting that the letter not only was not written by the head of the Roman church, but that it was not expressive of the views of the entire church. According to this view, the letter instead represents a perspective advanced by just one of the many "house churches" in the city, in an age when a variety of forms of Christianity were present in Rome (see especially Lampe, Jeffers).

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Its later attribution to the sole bishop of the city, Clement, may represent a "best guess" by later Christians, or may even have been an orthodox claim used to bolster their own position vis-a-vis other groups con tending for power in the church. On the other hand, it is clear that even though the letter claims to have been written by "the church" of Rome, it must have been composed by a single author (rather than a group), and that one of the plausible persons for the task may well have been the otherwise unknown Clement, secretary for foreign correspondence mentioned by Hermas.

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We are on somewhat firmer ground when it comes to assigning a date to the letter, although here too scholars have raised serious questions. What is clear is that since the letter is mentioned by Dionysius of Corinth and Hegessipus somewhat before 170 CE on the one hand, and since it refers to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, usually placed in the reign of Nero, ca. 64, on the other hand, it must have been written sometime between these two dates. The traditional date of 95-96 is based on the indication of Eusebius that it was written near the end of the reign of Domitian (emperor from 81-96).

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Support for the dating was found in the ancient view, also advanced by Eusebius, that during his final years Domitian instigated a persecution of Christians in Rome. This context of persecution was used to explain the opening of the letter, which speaks of the "sudden and repeated misfortunes and set backs we have experienced"”which were taken to refer to the arrest and prosecution of Christians during a Domitianic reign of terror.

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This view of the historical context is now by and large rejected. There is nothing in the epistle that suggests it was written in the context of persecution: the "misfortunes and setbacks" could just as easily have been internal struggles within the church. Moreover, there is no solid evidence from the period itself of a persecution of Christians under Domitian.

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Even so, a date near the end of Domitian's reign is altogether plausible. The epistle could not have been written much later: it indicates that the deaths of Peter and Paul took place "within our own generation" (ch. 5) and assumes that there are still living leaders of the Christian churches who had been appointed by the apostles of Jesus, that is, sometime no later than early in the second half of the first century (chs. 42,44).

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Moreover, there is no indication that the hierarchical structures later so important to proto-orthodox Christians”in which there was a solitary bishop over a group of presbyters and deacons”was yet in place.

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Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that the letter may well have been written much earlier than traditionally supposed, possibly prior to 70 (see Welborn). But the letter calls the Corinthian church "ancient" (ch. 47), which seems somewhat inappropriate if it were only twenty-five or thirty years old; it assumes that some churches are headed by leaders twice removed from Jesus' apostles (appointees of those ordained by the apostles, ch. 46); and it suggests that the bearers of the letter from Rome have been faithful members of the church "from youth to old age," which must make them older than their mid-40s (ch. 63). For these reasons, it appears best to assume a date sometime near the end of the first century, possibly, as traditionally thought, in the mid 90s during the reign of Domitian.

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Historical Significance

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If this dating is correct, then 1 Clement was produced at about the same time as or even before some of the writings of the New Testament (e.g., 2 Peter and Revelation). It is, at any rate, the oldest Christian writing outside of the New Testament. This makes aspects of the letter highly significant for historians interested in the development of the Christian church in the earliest period.

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The following are just three of the important issues.

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(1) The use of Scripture.

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At the same time, it is clear that this author (a) does not yet have anything like a canon of "New Testament" Scriptures, and yet (b) is beginning to ascribe authority to the words of Jesus and the writings of his apostles (see Hagner). He quotes Jesus' words on several occasions (see chs. 13 and 46), evidently as he knows them from oral traditions rather than written Gospels, since the quotations do not match any of our surviving texts.

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In addition he refers explicitly to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (ch. 47) and alludes on numerous occasions to other writings that later came to form part of the New Testament canon (for example, Hebrews; see ch. 36). That is to say, we can see here the very beginnings of the process in which Christian authorities (Jesus and his apostles) are assigned authority comparable to that of the Jewish Scriptures, the beginnings, in other words, of the formation of the Christian canon. In this connection, it is worth noting that some Chris tians in later centuries regarded 1 Clement itself as scriptural. It is quoted as such by Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, and it is included as part of the New Testament.

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Like the Pastoral Epistles ( I Timothy, II Timothy, and Titus), Bishops, and Elders/Presbyters are synonymous. (There are also Deacons)Ignatius (probably written 107-108 or possible 115-116) was the first to clearly distinguish between Bishops and Elders/Presbyters.That makes the date likely no later than 100.The lack of quoting the Pastoral Epistles (except one possible reference that is an unimportant saying that is off the main topic of Bishops and Elders) is a major dating clue.The usefulness quoting of the Pastoral Epistles suggests they were perhaps not written yet (or just being written).There could be NO WRITTEN GOSPEL QUOTATIONS (but oral traditions that made it into Greek Matthew 5-7, plus other places, were in I Clement for sure)One more thing: Paul is mentioned.

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LMA, Why do you think that dumping a pile of copy and paste text on a page is worth doing? I don't read it and I'm pretty sure nobody else does.
Why not make whatever argument you have, simply and short and stick to one point at a time using your own words?

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I doubt most are familiar with the issues involved in dating Clement of Rome (1 Clement) to 90-100.I would rather give people a chance to see what scholars (in this case, it was Bart Ehrman's Introduction to his translation of the man Catholics call "Pope Clement") look at.It would actually take a lot more text if I gave my reasons for an early date.(The biggest reason is that Ignatius has a MUCH more developed Church hierarchy than 1 Clement)(That, also, was always a problem for those who wanted to date the Pastoral Epistles after Ignatius of Antioch)Understand that this is the only (probable) pre 100 Christian document from outside the Bible. People need to learn about it, and the learning process does involve a deeper understanding of the issues the scholars look at (mind you: I DIN NOT post anything that would come close to doing the job, and I wish I could post a lot more from multiple sources)

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Again you show that there is no independent, contemporary evidence for the existence of the Jesus Christ character. 100 CE is not contemporary to 30 CE. That would be the same as claiming that we are contemporary to WWII. I know of no one alive that would be able to confirm or deny that there was a wandering preacher in this area during the 1930's and 40's. Your copypasta gishgallop just reaffirms that you have no evidence. Thank you for helping me to make my points.

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But this (I Clement)Epistle to the Corinthians demonstrated the fact that Paul was a good ways in the past.Ringo said that Paul might not have existed. He later said he didn't care one way or another. Others will question how far back we can assume Paul wrote his Epistles, when we strip ourselves of the Acts of the Apostles. Others, still, want "non Biblical evidence" to date Paul (In that case, I suppose we can't even consider his Epistles as helping us form a date for his missionary career).We know that there was a (however small) collection of Paul's Epistles in the possession of Clement of Rome, while he might not have had a written Gospel (though he had some sort of Jesus material) yet.We know that (regardless of the interpretation of 1 Clement) the combined evidence of Ignatius, Barnabas, and Didache (plus, perhaps, Papias, though he used oral sayings or Logions, as he is now being dated 95-120) demand that Greek Matthew was written no later than the 90s A.D.,and this places Mark no later than 80-85.The early non-Biblical Christian documents show us that Paul clearly dates before Mark.Paul almost definitely wrote his Epistles before 80, just from the evidence from the early non-Christian documents alone.So Paul's Epistles date no later than the 70s.Going further:If we can actually be allowed to read Paul's Epistles (for "evidence") then we can see he wrote his letters over a career that seems to span at least 10 years (probably longer). We can also see that he might not have known anything involving the MARKAN narrative of events in Jesus' life, thus indicating that the circulating pericopes - which later made it into The Gospel of Mark - were not YET assigned enough weight and credibility to warrant the attention of Paul's pen. Perhaps Paul was aware of many of the Jesus stories (that would make the cut in the Gospel of Mark), he simply couldn't separate the bogus historical stories from the actual accurate events, so he went without mentioning anything?So, the pericodes that would later make it into Mark (the early church said it was Peter himself that possessed all the material, then Mark put it into writing, but "form critics" 100% deny that tradition and see very different process and origin of the pericopes) were not yet credible enough in Paul's day - as the narrative events involved in the Gospel of Mark woud have needed a period of credibility & acceptance before they would be put into such a high quality, not to mention refined & expensive, work as the Gospel of Mark was.That is more evidence that Paul is even earlier still (than the 70s).So without any "Biblical" documents, aside from Paul's Epistles, we can place the bulk of his writings before 70.Then, we must consider his, seeming, long career WHEN ONLY HIS EPISTLES ARE READ (Acts compresses his - written Epistle - career into a span of just 7-9 years). That would put his Epistles into the 50s for sure.I find Paul to be a man we might possibly know about even if a Bible was never written.(Though we will never know what would have been preserved if history had played out differently)

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As for Josephus you are less than honest in your comments. IN the Testimonium he is reputed to say.

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He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ.

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Not something an observant Jew would say. But more importantly it does not matter. This is not evidence of Jesus. It is evidence that people believed in him. No corroboration. Find corroboration.
If all you reply with is copypasta and a bunch of shit thrown against the wall I am done with you.

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You keep using Ant Book 18 as proof that Book 20 is fake.Your sloppy methodology is just glaring.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

The problem is that Jesus Mythers can't get their story straight on why the Josephus text was messed up.Richard Carrier somewhat recently wrote for the Journal of Early Christian Studies.(it is the same journal that I have been quoting: The Second Century, A Journal Of Early Christian Studies, but after Johns Hopkins purchased it, around 1993, it dropped the "The Second Century" part, and now covers the period as far as the 8th or 9th century)His argument was that the Book 20 Josephus reference ("called Christ" after "brother of Jesus") was just a careless note by a Christian scribe. Not deliberate fraud as is shown in Book 18.My problem with the methodology starts with:Jesus Mythers generally start out with a conclusion then search for an excuse to justify the conclusion.(You would never do that, would you Theodoric?)

You were finished before you even started.You also should ask what predictions the Jesus Mythers have made?They make claims, but their theory needs some admitted way to be falsified.Doherty wrote his book Jesus Puzzle in 1990.I think Price wrote in 2001.Carrier has online Myther articles from 2002.The Myther claim (among others) that the entire line "brother of Jesus called Christ, James" was false (and "fraud") because only Christians would have written about a James brother of Jesus, seems to be ditched? Now they say it was just carelessness and just "called Christ" was added.When mid-first century archaeological artifacts are found ("James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" in 2003), Mythers claimed it was fraud (modern inscriptions). It has been proven to NOT be fraud. (though there is STILL a lot of doubt that it refers to the New Testament characters)The Mythers were wrong about the James Ossuary being a forgery (with tampering).Why should we trust their claims of Christian "tampering" on the other secular first century mention of a James with a brother named Jesus?

Theodoric is good at reaching conclusions while searching for a theory.The Jesus Mythers like to use Origin as evidence for the controversial Josephus Ant Book 18 "Testinonium Flavianum" not being in the original manuscript.Then we get to Ant Book 20, and the other mention of Jesus.They also like to make much of Origin's seeming quotation of Hegesippus, and then say that the "Brother of Jesus, called Christ" was added later (Doherty says Eusebius, in around 325, invented the line).Now Carrier has a different theory:(not a free journal article)
Project MUSE - Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200(Carrier's article can be read in full if you purchase on of his books, which has all of his journal articles reproduced, but I forget the title. It has "Homer" in the title I think)Carrier puts the change earlier.Back to a more mainstream type of theory:Here is the starting point THEORY (in my opinion):I quote from "The Testimonium Flavianum and the Martyrdom of James", by Zvi Baras in:Josephus, Judaism and Christianity
Ed (Louis H. Feldman & Gohei Hata)
(WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. DETROIT, 1987)(I made far more paragraph divisions than was in the original text plus put some quotation marks in spots, so reading could be easier)

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Let us first reproduce the passage of Josephus concerning the trial and death of James, in which he recounts that Ananus the Younger, the high priest, brought James, during the absence of the Roman procurator from Judea, to trial:

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"Ananus thought that he had a favorable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this."

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In the hands of Origen and Eusebius, this incident, defined as "the martyrdom of James," became, through Christian historiosophical interpretation, the main cause for the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple. Moreover, they went so far as to say that Josephus himself regarded this catastrophe as just punishment for the execution of James”a statement not supported by the text reproduced above or by any other extant version. But Origen did not stop here; he not only attributed to Josephus a statement unknown to us from any other source or version but also "corrected" Josephus' alleged statement in a way favorable to the Christian historiosophical point of view.

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Let us observe these stages in Origen's writings and note carefully how Origen uses Josephus apropos the martyrdom of James. Origen mentions James' martyrdom three times in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and each time he introduces a small but meaningful addition.

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First, in his Commentarii in Matthaeum X, 17:

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"This James was of so shining a character among the people, on account of his righteousness, that Flavius Josephus, when, in his twentieth book of the Jewish Antiquities, he had a mind to set down what was the cause why the people suffered such miseries, till the very holy house was demolished, said that these things befell them by the anger of God, on account of what they had dared to do to James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ; and wonderful it is that while he did not receive Jesus for Christ, he did nevertheless bear witness that James was so righteous a man. He says further that the people thought they had suffered these things for the sake of James."

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What strikes us immediately is the unanimous conclusion that places the blame for the destruction of the Temple on the execution of James. Yet Origen bothers to distinguish between Josephus' conclusion and that of the people. He directs us to Antiquities XX, where, indeed, the story of James is recounted; but when he refers to the people's same deduction, he fails to produce direct documentation and only says vaguely "further."

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The second time Origen refers to the martyrdom of James and to the destruction of the Temple is in his polemical book Contra Celsum I, 47:

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"For Josephus in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities bears witness that John was a baptist and promised purification to people who were baptized. The same author, although he did not believe in Jesus as Christ, sought for the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. He ought to have said that the plot against Jesus was the reason why these catastrophes came upon the people, because they had killed the prophesied Christ; however, although unconscious of it, he is not far from the truth when he says that these disasters befell the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of 'Jesus the so-called Christ/ since they had killed him who was a very righteous man. This is the James whom Paul, the true disciple of Jesus, says that he saw, describing him as the Lord's brother, not referring so much to their blood-relationship or common upbringing as to his moral life and understanding. If therefore he says that the destruction of Jerusalem happened because of James, would it not be more reasonable to say that this happened on account of Jesus the Christ?"

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Here we find some new elements. Origen "corrects" Josephus' alleged conclusion, saying that Josephus should have assigned the blame for the destruction not on the execution of James the Just, but rather on the Jews' mistreatment of Jesus. The other element introduced here by Origen to strengthen his argumentation is the logical category of inference or deduction, twice repeated: "If therefore . . . , would it not be more reasonable?"

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A further point to note is that while Origen refers us to Antiquities XVIII, where the account about John the Baptist is given, he remains tacit as to where Josephus' socalled conclusion can be found. The third time Origen refers to the same conclusion is also in Contra Celsum II, 13:

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"While Jerusalem was still standing and all the Jewish worship was going on in it, Jesus foretold what was to happen to it through the Romans. For surely they will not say that Jesus' own pupils and hearers handed down his teaching of the gospels without writing it down, and that they left their disciples without their reminiscences of Jesus in writing. In them it is written: 'And when you see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that her desolation is at hand.' At that time there were no armies at all round Jerusalem, compassing it about and surrounding and besieging it. The siege began when Nero was still emperor, and continued until the rule of Vespasian. His son, Titus, captured Jerusalem, so Josephus says, on account of James the Just, the brother of Jesus the so-called Christ, though in reality it was on account of Jesus the Christ of God."

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This stage, however, asserts as fact that the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem "in reality was on account of Jesus." In order to make his historical deduction more plausible, Origen first refers to Luke 21:20, where Jesus foretold the destruction of Jerusalem, then he "corrects" Josephus' alleged conclusion as found in Contra Celsum 1,47. This interpretation”developed through the stages seen above and hardly unintentionally”culminated in Origen's concept of universal history, which was presented in Contra Celsum IV, 22. Here Origen states, this time without reference to James' martyrdom, that the destruction of Jerusalem was a just retribution for the mistreatment of Jesus. But although Josephus' importance for Origen lay mainly in the fact that he was a contemporaneous historian ("a man who lived not long after John and Jesus"), Origen did not quote him directly; only in indirect speech (oratio obliqua) did Origen summarize Josephus' information.

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How, then, could Origen have arrived at such a conclusion, attributed by him to Josephus, and whence could he have found support? The lack of such a version in the extant text of Josephus has induced scholars to explain it in different ways.

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One is the assumption that Origen's version of James' martyrdom indeed appeared in Josephus' original text, but has not been preserved. Such an assumption over looks the question of why the Testimonium passage should have remained in Josephus' text, while the story of James' martyrdom”neither disdainful nor defamatory toward Christ”should have been excised from Josephus' writings.

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The other generally accepted explanation is that Origen confused the accounts of James and John the Baptist in Josephus and Hegesippus and followed the latter, who associated James' martyrdom with the siege of Jerusalem. We reproduce here only the last few relevant lines of Hegesippus, as quoted at length by Eusebius:

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"Such was his martyrdom. He was buried on the spot, by the Sanctuary, and his headstone is still there by the Sanctuary. He has proved a true witness to Jews and Gentiles alike that Jesus is Christ. Immediately after this Vespasian began to besiege them."

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Could Origen have confused the sources? Such negligence on the part of so meticulous a scholar is unacceptable. I have already pointed out elsewhere that it seems more likely that the sequential events (hoc post hoc) in Hegesippus”namely, James' martyrdom and the siege”became for Origen causal events (hoc propter hoc).

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In fact, I believe that we can now point to a specific place, or incident, in Josephus' own writings”unnoticed so far by scholars in this context”which led Origen to say that Josephus should have corrected his historical interpretation.

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I refer to Antiquities XI, 297-305 , where the remarks of Josephus may have served Origen as guideposts in leading him in the direction he took.

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In this paragraph Josephus recounts the death of Jeshua (i.e. Jesus; this is another name for Christ) at the hand of his brother, Johanan (Joannes) the high priest. Josephus condemns the crime and says that God punished the Jews by enslaving them and by desecrating the Temple:

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"Joannes had a brother named Jesus; and Bagoses, whose friend he was, promised to obtain the high priesthood for him. With this assurance, therefore, Jesus quarrelled with Joannes in the Temple and provoked his brother so far that in his anger he killed him. That Joannes should have committed so impious a deed against his brother while serving as priest was terrible enough, but the more terrible in that neither among Greeks nor barbarians had so savage and impious a deed ever been committed. The Deity, however, was not indifferent to it, and it was for this reason that the people were made slaves and the Temple was defiled by the Persians. Now, when Bagoses, the general of Artaxerxes, learned that . . . , he at once set upon the Jews . . . . This, then, being the pretext which he used, Bagoses made the Jews suffer seven years for the death of Jesus."

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This story contains many elements that are relevant to the Christian historical interpretation.

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For instance, here the high priest causes the death of Jesus, as it is in the case of Jesus Christ and his brother, James; the crime brings about God's retribution; and the punishment for Jeshua/Jesus' death comes shortly afterwards.

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Moreover, the paragraph offers clear causal argumentation ("and it was for this reason") for the miseries that befell the Jews: the terrible sin committed was followed by God's punishment. Even the kinds of retribution described in this chapter”the enslavement of the people and the desecration of the Temple”could very easily fit the Christian attitude; namely, that the punishment for the mistreatment of Jesus Christ was the overthrow and dispersion of the Jewish nation and the destruction of the Temple.

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Indeed, Origen says this in his Contra Celsum IV, 22:

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"I challenge anyone to prove my statement untrue if I say that the entire Jewish nation was destroyed less than one whole generation later on account of these sufferings which they inflicted upon Jesus. For it was, I believe, forty-two years from the time when they crucified Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem. . . . For they committed the most impious crime of all, when they conspired against the Savior of mankind, in the city where they performed to God the customary rites which were symbols of profound mysteries. Therefore, that city where Jesus suffered these indignities had to be utterly destroyed. The Jewish nation had to be overthrown, and God's invitation to blessedness transferred to others, I mean the Christians, to whom came the teaching about the simple and pure worship of God."

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It seems, therefore, that Josephus served Origen not so much for explicit documentation and direct quotation as for supporting his own Christian historiosophy.

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Now we turn to Eusebius to observe the way he treated Josephus' account of James' martyrdom. But first we have to point out that Eusebius was Origen's successor at the school of Caesarea; he was not only acquainted with the works of Origen but also indebted to them. Eusebius, like Origen, regarded Josephus as an important historian, contemporary with Jesus, worthy of being quoted many times and of having his reputation stressed among Jews and Romans alike.

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It is, therefore, only natural that Eusebius grasped the full historical significance of Origen's observation that Josephus should have explained differently the disaster that befell the Jews. So seriously did he take Origen's suggestion that he tried his best to follow it in his own History of the Church.

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Indeed, Chapter 23 of this book is devoted to the martyrdom of James. In it Eusebius quotes various sources to prove the far-reaching historical implication for Christianity and reveals he shared his master's opinion on that point. However, unlike Origen, who in indirect speech (oratio obliqua) stressed that Josephus allegedly recognized the causality between the killing of James and the destruction of Jerusalem, Eusebius quotes Josephus in direct speech (oratio recta), as can be seen from a comparison of the two quotations:

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Origen, Contra Celsum I, 47:

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"[he says that] these disasters befell the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus the so-called Christ, since they had killed him who was a very righteous man"

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(Chadwick trans., p. 43).

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Eusebius, History of the Church, II, 23, 20:

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"These things happened to the Jews in requital for James the Righteous, who was a brother of Jesus known as Christ, for though he was the most righteous of men, the Jews put him to death"

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(Williamson trans., p. 102).

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The precise parallelism between the two texts has already been remarked by Chadwick, who proved that Eusebius quoted Origen's passage verbatim, but changed it to direct speech. It seems that only his dogmatic adherence to Origen's interpretation of history can explain Eusebius' departure from his custom of exact and attributive citation. Eusebius' faithfulness to Origen's interpretation is made obvious by his insistent refrain”sometimes without any reference to James' martyrdom”that the crime against Jesus resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple. In order to convince his readers, he, too, equates historical causality with sequential events, and points to a series of calamities that befell Jerusalem”all occurring under the procuratorship of Pilate, during whose regime the crime against Jesus was committed:

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Beside this, the same writer shows that in Jerusalem itself a great many other revolts broke out, making it clear that from then on the city and all Judea were in the grip of faction, war, and an endless succession of criminal plots, until the final hour overtook them”the siege under Vespasian. Such was the penalty laid upon the Jews by divine justice for their crimes against Christ.

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Loyalty to Origen is apparent in the way Eusebius applies Origen's recommendation of how Josephus should have explained the calamities of the Jewish nation. He subtly attributes such an explanation to Josephus himself, not by quoting him as one might have expected and as it was his custom, but by summing up:

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"His statements are confirmed by Josephus, who similarly points out that the calamities which overtook the whole nation began with the time of Pilate and the crimes against the Savior."

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We seem to have come full circle: it begins with Origen's "emendation" of Josephus' explanation for the Jewish catastrophe, through James' citation, allegedly from Josephus, but in fact deriving from Origen; then it continues with Eusebius' full application of Origen's proposal that events be given a Christian interpretation focused on the crucifixion by attempting to put into the mouth of Josephus the imputation that the Jews were punished because of their crime against Jesus.

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On another thread, I was attempting to make send of the Eusebius "Josephus quotation":

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Eusebius, History of the Church, II, 23, 20: "These things happened to the Jews in requital for James the Righteous, who was a brother of Jesus known as Christ, for though he was the most righteous of men, the Jews put him to death"

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This might make sense of it.(It sure beats Earl Doherty's theory that this was a "confusion" of Origen, in mistaking Hegesippus' words for Josephus, and the inspiration for Eusebius to simply amend the Ant. Book XX text to - FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! - say "brother of Jesus called Christ".)(Theodoric refused to respond btw, instead attacked me for going off topic, while he offers no theory of his own, just claims)Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

(it was like 90% my own words)EvC Forum: Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured FaithSee my post 1659Theodoric did not respond in any meaningful way.

Theodoric keeps blowing the Testimonium Flavianum (Josephus Ant. Book 18) flute.He has really been performing a clever "bait and switch", because he keeps making comments like this, to "prove" that the Book 20 reference to "brother of Jesus called Christ" was forged.

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As for Josephus you are less than honest in your comments. IN the Testimonium he is reputed to say.

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He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ.

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Not something an observant Jew would say. But more importantly it does not matter. This is not evidence of Jesus. It is evidence that people believed in him. No corroboration. Find corroboration.

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Theodoric is not only a one note flute, but it always is with a bait and switch.He follows this pattern.ONE:Ask for first-century documents mentioning Christians and Biblical characters.TWO:Wait for somebody to present them, which they willTHREE:Change the subject (such as Josephus Ant. Book 20) to another (Book 18).FOUR:Claim that one bit of evidence for later Christian tampering causes ALL other evidence to be thrown out.(Did I miss anything?)Now, what about Theodoric's law code?This legal technicality argument is getting old.(What law code are you applying anyway)You push him long enough, and he responds:

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As for Josephus, you miss my point completely. The one Jesus reference puts the other into doubt.

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I think we all get your point.But you can only really say the Testimonium Flavianum (Josephus Ant. Book 18 reference to Jesus: "He was the Christ") is likely a POST 250 CHRISTIAN INSERTION because Origen did not mention it, and the absence of mention by Origen is all the more impressive because he positively comments on Josephus' lack of belief in Jesus as Messiah. The evidence does seem to indicate that the TF is an insertion from around 300 A.D.But Origin did say that Josephus mentioned the "brother of Jesus, called Christ" and he specifically described a murder. Origin even attempted to interpret Josephus' comments as somehow supportive of the idea that the killing of James caused the Temple to be destroyed.Yet there were no textual changes, to Jospehus' Antiquities, that worked that powerful Christian idea (clearly held from the mid-second century Hegesippus through Origen in the first half of the third century and INTO THE FORTH) into the Josephus text.The BOOK 20 (not the Book 18 TF!) text has no evidence of changes to fit Christian theological views of the history of the destruction of the Temple.Origen lived from 184-253.During Origens time:The "brother of Jesus called Christ" in Book 20 was in Josephus' text, it seems.The "He was the Christ" in Book 18 (Testimonium Flavianum) was not.Theodoric says, "The one Jesus reference puts the other into doubt".I can't prove that there were no changes, to Book 20, before 200 A.D. But it seems that there were no changes after 200. Changes (major ones too) to Book 18, around 300, only prove that Book 18 was changed. Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

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All the books of the Bible are apocryphal. We do not know who wrote them, when or their provenance. We do know some of the Pauline epistles were written by a dude named Paul. That is pretty much all we know about him. He states that everything he knows about Jesus is by revelation. He clearly says he did not know an earthly Jesus or ever met anyone that has met an earthly Jesus.
Why do you ignore this evidence?

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Which Bible?Here is a website called History For Athiests.

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Marcion was born around 100 AD in the city of Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea. After a falling out with his father, the local bishop, he travelled to Rome in around 139 AD. There he began to develop his own Christian theology; one which was quite different to that of his father and of the Christian community in Rome. Marcion was struck by the strong distinction made by Paul between the Law of the Jews and the gospel of Christ. For Marcion, this distinction was absolute: the coming of Jesus made the whole of the Jewish Law and Jewish Scriptures redundant and the ‘God’ of the Jews was actually quite different to the God preached by Jesus. For Marcion, the Jewish God was evil, vengeful, violent and judgemental, while the God of Jesus was quite the opposite. Marcion decided that there were actually two Gods – the evil one who had misled the Jews and the good one revealed by Jesus.

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This understanding led Marcion to put together a canon of Christian Scripture – the first of its kind – which excluded all of the Jewish Scriptures that make up the Old Testament and which included ten of the Epistles of Paul and only one of the gospels: the Gospel of Luke.

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Marcion tried to get his radical reassessment of Christianity and his canon accepted by calling a council of the Christian community in Rome. Far from accepting his teachings, the council excommunicated him and he left Rome in disgust, returning to Asia Minor. There he met with far more success, and Marcionite churches sprang up which embraced his idea of two Gods and used his canon of eleven scriptural works. Alarmed at his success, other Christian leaders began to preach and write vigorously against Marcion’s ideas and it seems that his canon of eleven works inspired anti-Marcionite Christians to begin to define which texts were and were not Scriptural.

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I would have to say that the first known Bible was not a forgery.It consisted of actual copies of actual graphs from a guy actually named Paul.It is not mostly pseudographical.It was not apocryphal.Not the first known Bible from just before 150 CE.

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Bayesian analysis is becoming a part of modern historical scholarship. Not just Carrier. Whether you think it is bollux is irrelevant. Also, Carrier has many peer reviewed articles that do not include Bayes Theorem at all.
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He is a vile human being, but a hell of a scholar.

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Carrier is often mentioned by you, but you never show us his scoring technique.He actually has a grading scale for every piece of evidence.He has responded to his critics by challenging them to quantify the evidence using their own scoring system centering around Bayesian analysis and the statistical scale.He responds to his critics, by pointing out that he does grade the James references as evidence for the history of Jesus.You never show us his scoring system for any individual item.(also, he has not been found guilty of crimes. He only is certainly loose sexually, but the crimes were never demonstrated, were they?)

You said the Bible was Apocryphal.(You hedged it by granting the "dude" named Paul wrote stuff)I am saying the guy who called himself Paul, is accepted to have existed, and is massively accepted as the writer of 7 of his 10 epistles, which Marcion attributed to him.The only other book in the first Bible (Marcion's) is Luke-Acts.So 7 of the 11 are certainly not Pseudoepigraphic, by any stretch.I am saying your headline point is false.Demonstrably false.

There are two undisputed leaders in the Jesus Myther school: Robert M Price and Richard Carrier.Price has a 44 minute YouTube video called THE FIRST BIBLE and it is about MarcionHe also has a massive book called the Pre-Nicene New Testament, and it is his own translation of 54 early texts.Amazon has Price's own words reproduced

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About the Author
Robert M. Price holds doctoral degrees from Drew University in both theology and New Testament. He is currently Professor of Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, traveling lecturer for the Center for Inquiry Institute in Amherst, New York, and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism. His books include The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul, Deconstructing Jesus, The Da Vinci Fraud, The Reason-Driven Life, Paul as Text: The Apostle and the Apocrypha, and The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny. He has published in the American Rationalist, Evangelical Quarterly, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Reformed Journal, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Marcionite invasion

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The history of a distinctively Christian scriptural canon begins with Marcion of Pontus in Asia Minor. Traditionally dated about 140 AD/CE, Marcion actually may have begun his public ministry earlier, just after the turn of the century. One ancient tradition makes Marcion the amanuensis (secretary) of the evangelist John at the end of the first century. That is probably not historically true, but no one would have told the story if they had not assumed Marcion was living at that time. It was a general tendency of early Catholic apologists to late-date the so-called “heretics” to distance them from the apostolic period in the same way apologists today prefer the earliest possible date for the epistles and gospels.

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Marcion was the first Paulinist we know of. It would later be a matter of some embarrassment to the church fathers that the earliest readers and devotees of the Pauline epistles were the Marcionites and the Valentinian Gnostics. We know of no Paulinists before these second-century Christians. The mid-first century existence of Pauline Christianity is simply an inference, admittedly a natural one, from taking the authorship and implied dates of the Pauline epistles at face value as works representing a wing of first-century Christianity. But it is quite possible that the Pauline literature is the product of Marcionite and Gnostic movements in the late first and early second centuries. Even if most of the Pauline epistles are genuinely from the first century, the most likely candidate for the first collector of the corpus remains Marcion. No one else in the relevant time period would have had either the interest or the opportunity. No one was as interested in Paul as Marcion. Why?

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It was because he shared with his theological cousins, the Gnostics, the belief that the true God and Father of Jesus Christ was not the same deity as the creator and law-giver God of Israel and of the Jewish scriptures. In this belief Marcion was perhaps influenced by Zoro-astrian Zurvanism, a dualistic doctrine, as Jan Koester suggests. Marcion allowed that the creator God was righteous and just but also harsh and retributive. His seeming grace was but a function of his arbitrariness: Nero might render a verdict of thumbs-up or thumbs-down as the whim moved him, and so with the God of Israel. Marcion deemed the Jewish scriptures historically true and expected messianic prophecies to be fulfilled by a Davidic king who would restore Jewish sovereignty. But Marcion deemed all of this strictly irrelevant to the new religion of Christianity. In his view, which he claimed to have derived from Paul’s epistles, Jesus Christ was the son and revealer of an alien God who had not created the world, had not given the Torah to Moses, and would not judge mankind. The Father of Jesus Christ was a God of perfect love and righteousness who would punish no one. Through Jesus, and by extension Paul, the Christian God offered humans the opportunity to be adopted as his children. If they were gentiles, this meant a break with paganism. If they were Jews, it entailed a break from Judaism and the Torah. Marcion preached a strict morality. All sex was sinful. Begetting children only produced more souls to live in bondage to the creator. Marcion believed Jesus had no physical birth but had appeared out of heaven one day in a body that seemed to be that of a thirty-year-old, complete with a misleading belly button, although not human at all: rather a celestial being. Jesus taught and was later crucified. His twelve disciples were to spread his gospel of an alien God and his adoption of all who would come to him. But things v/ent awry: the disciples, as thick-headed and prone to misunderstanding as they appear in the Gospel of Mark, underestimated the discontinuity of Jesus’ new revelation with their hereditary Judaism, thereby combining the two. This was the origin of the Judaiz-ing heresy with which Paul deals in Galatians and elsewhere.

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Marcion had noticed an oddity most Christians never notice as they read the New Testament: if Jesus had named the Twelve to succeed him and seemed satisfied with them, why was there a need for Paul at all? And why should he come to eclipse the others in importance? The Twelve are, for the most part, merely a list of names. By contrast, Paul wrote letters that formed the basis of much of the church’s theology. Marcion saw a simple answer: the risen Jesus saw how far off the track his disciples would go and decided to recruit another who would get the message straight. This was Paul. To invoke a recurrent pattern in Christian history, think of Martin Luther, Alexander Campbell, John Nelson Darby, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Victor Paul Wierwille, and others. All these believed that original, apostolic Christianity was corrupted by an admixture of human tradition, and they believed they had a new vision of the outlines of the original, true Christianity and could restore it. This is what Marcion thought already in the early second century. It should not sound that strange to us. Like these later men, Marcion would succeed very well in launching a new church, one that would spread like wildfire all over and even beyond the Roman Empire. Most noteworthy is the fact that the New Testament was his idea.

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The emerging Catholic Church, which would develop into the medieval church, which then subsequently split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by this time employing the familiar authority structure of scripture and tradition. By scripture was meant the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Jewish scriptures, including the so-called apocryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, and so on. This was “scripture.” Tradition, on the other hand, was a growing body of sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him, as well as the summaries of “apostolic” doctrine represented in such formulae as the Apostles Creed and similar summaries in the late second century by writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian, to name two. There were a number of early Christian writings of various kinds (gospels, epistles, apostolic acts, revelations, church manuals) that were written and circulated more or less widely, but these were at first more expressions of the.faith than either the source or criteria for faith. That is not to say they were not important. Think of the writings of Calvin and Luther: they are important to Calvinists and Lutherans who still study them, but Calvinists and Lutherans would not consider the wise writings of their founders to be scripture on the same level with the Bible. Admittedly, the difference in actual practice may evaporate, but that is just the technical distinction that is important here. The question that concerns us is precisely how the early Christian writings came to cross that line and join the category of scripture. The earliest Catholic Christians felt no need as yet for new scripture since they found the Septuagint Bible adequate to their needs as long as they could use allegory and typology to see in it a book about Jesus Christ and Christianity.

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This reinterpretation of Jewish scripture was not something Mar-cion was willing to undertake. He insisted on a literal, straightforward reading of the Septuagint, refusing to treat it as a ventriloquist dummy and make it seem to speak with Christian accents. Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428) had the same attitude, though he was no Marcionite. Read in a plain-sense fashion, the Jewish scriptures, Mar-cion realized, had nothing to do with Christianity. Even lacking his belief in two different biblical Gods, one can see his point when one thinks of the strained arguments needed in order to make various Old Testament passages sound like predictions of Jesus. And it is still common today to hear Christians contrast the severe God of Israel with the tender Father of Jesus. So Marcion repudiated the Jewish scriptures. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe them, because he did. He simply felt they were the scriptures of someone else’s religion and didn’t overlap with Christianity as he understood it. Nor was he anti-Semitic or even anti-Judaic. For him, Judaism was true on its own terms, just not the religion of Jesus Christ or of the apostle Paul.

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Without the Septuagint as his scripture, Marcion felt the need to compile a new canon that would teach Christian faith and morals authoritatively. He accordingly collected the early Christian writings he felt served this purpose. These were paramountly the Pauline epistles except for the Pastorals, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, because these did not exist yet, still waiting to be written in reaction to Marcion and other “heretics” in the mid-second century. Marcion had shorter, earlier versions of the texts than ours. Likewise, he had a book he knew simply as “the gospel” corresponding to a shorter version of our Gospel of Luke. Catholic writers decades later would claim he had edited and censored the texts, cutting out material that served to link Christianity with its Jewish background. Marcion no doubt did do some editing, textual criticism as it seemed to him, but it seems that Catholic apologists did much more in the way of padding the texts with their own added material, claiming their own versions were original and should be adopted instead of the Marcionite text. Marcion called his scripture the Apostolicon (“Book of the Apostle”). In his and his opponents’ claims and counter claims, we begin to see the inevitable relation of the twin issues of text and canon–which versions of which writings are authoritative?

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1560851945
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Signature Books; 1st edition (November 15, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1248 pages

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This is the early Christian collection that we know of.It probably should count as THE Bible, with the definite article.If anything should.

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Marcion's collection of works, some of which it is thought he wrote or heavily edited himself, predates the Christian, but it was not the precursor to the modern Christian Bible. The early Christian collection was likely a response to Marcion's, many of whose beliefs they did not share.
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Does this exchange you're having with Theodoric tie in to the question of the existence of the historical Jesus?

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I actually don't think Marcion heavily edited, as he is often accused. But I am wondering where to start and what to respond to.I should just say that my initial point is that Theodoric was looking at later Bible collections (he mentioned Paul's epistles almost as an afterthought, when they were THE (Christian) BIBLE at first, and I felt it was quite a glaring error), and he was using that to make the point that The Bible was full of pseudographs, when quite the opposite is the case, if one uses the proper methodology - start early, when you look at datums.Now:Paul's letters are indeed relevant to the historical Jesus.Just look at the intra-Jesus Myther debates, for evidence of that. Robert M Price and Richard Carrier have different styles, to put it mildly. Different ways of reading the texts. Price will explain away a verse by saying later Christian scribes added it in, and Carrier will criticize Price. Price will respond, saying "How can we maintain Jesus Mythicism if we allow that Paul actually wrote this". Carrier will then show no less than five different ways the text can BOTH have been written by Paul AND be consistent with Jesus Mythicism.Then Carrier will give the Pauline quote a 1 to 5 scale grade score which indicates Carriers opinion as to how strong the evidence (every line in the Bible counts as a type of evidence to Carrier) can be used to argue for or against historicity of Jesus.

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So you know nothing about Marcionism or Docetism. I was hoping these subjects were leading us to some evidence for the existence of Jesus. Marcion did not believe in a human Jesus, but rather in, Jesus the trickster, who was enveloped in some sort of magic at all times.

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Marcion's beliefs probably were a radical descendent of Jewish beliefs in The Two Powers of Heaven.See the Alan Segal book (based on a PhD thesis) Two Powers In Heaven, from 1978.I can quote it if you want.As for Marcion, I doubt you will respond to points I make, if past discussions are any indication. You claim everything is off topic, and you complain about my pasts an/or book quotations I type up.I used to own far more books (plus journals) than I presently have in my possession.I presently have:Marcion The Gospel of The Alien God by Adolf HarnackMarcion On The Restitution Of Christianity by R Joseph HoffmanPlus some works by Joseph B Tyson (though not very many, like I once had, and I think his volumes I presently have are less specifically about Marcion than Paul)I tend to agree more with the latter two, on Marcionite issues.Price used Hoffman's chronology, among other things, I see. He made Marcion's life much closer to the time of Paul. Harnack had proposed that Marcion was already into adulthood at the end of the first century.edit: Hoffman made Marcion a first century adult. strike Harnack.Typo

How about we go about things this way:Read this Richard Carrier response to Robert M Price, and then tell me what you think about the difference in techniques and style.https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17174Understand that Theodoric often references Carrier as if his ultimate conclusions are self-evidently true (he is indeed impressive, granted)I should make myself into Theodoric when I debate the Many Worlds Interpretation, and use some lines from Stephen Hawking as my argument from authority showpiece. (He said the MWI is "self-evidently true" and accepting it as ultimate reality is "trivial")Nothing messy to see here folks, just accept an move on...