CADRE Comments

Introducing Our Newest Member, Don Macintosh of the Transcending Proof Blog. More about Don in Comments Someone pointed out to me recently that on his blog Aron-Ra had announced his conversion to mythicism (the view that Jesus Christ was a religious invention rather than a historical figure) and supported it with arguments. Link to that post below: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ reasonadvocates/2015/11/03/ jesus-never-existed/ Given that Aron's post received plenty of attention (generating over 1,500 comments), I thought it deserved a serious if brief rebuttal, which begins below:   I saw an  article in Inquisitor   today, wherein someone read through 126 historic documents from 1st century Israel, written by people who should have known about Jesus, yet had never heard of him. This includes Josephus, whose only mention of Jesus is now known to have been a forgery or redaction inserted later by someone else. Josephus also wrote extensively about Herod the Gr...

In Part One , I discussed the famous paragraph from Josephus’ Antiquities known by its nickname the Testimonium Flavianum : the testimony of ‘Flavius’ (Josephus’ patron Roman name) to the life, death, and appearances-after-death (at least) of Jesus Christ. The internet hardly needs another article on the TestiFlav, of course, as it's quite famous, and has been chewed over repeatedly by proponents and opponents on all sides of the aisle. I wouldn't even have written Part One at all, except I wanted to remind readers of the principles for why and how scholars across the board, conservative and liberal, from true believers out to even some hypersceptics, accept the testimony as being mostly original to Josephus. (Some hypersceptics think the entire passage is an interpolation, and not everyone agrees about what the value of the passage is even if it's original, but that's a whole other issue.) That's because there's another version of the TestiFlav which no...

(Edited to add: by "recently" I mean mid-March 2010. My schedule is odd. {lopsided g}) Recently, our compatriot Victor Reppert reposted a link to Chris “Layman” Price’s fine essay on the major testimony from Josephus about Jesus ( which can be found archived here. ) Readers may be surprised to learn that there are a few other references to this testimony in ancient documents, which we can analyze for comparison with text-critical principles, to help derive an idea of the original text. But what happens when we turn those same principles on a very late source for the Testimonium, which has been (almost?) universally rejected as material for comparison--including by Chris? I think the results, while far from conclusive, are at least interesting! But first, some background for comparison. (Note: this entry deals with facts and theories very well-known among students of the early history of Christianity, especially on questions of the historical Jesus, and so co...

Note: Part 6 of this series can be found here. It discusses how Dr. Richard Pervo, in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts , very briefly covers his main positive evidence in favor of his theory that the author of Acts used Josephus when referring to the rebellions of Theudas and Judas the Galilean--a very brief coverage that mainly involves mentioning the superficial similarity of topical order while repeatedly insisting that the author of Acts is in (even "embarrassing") error. After which, Dr. P suddenly switches to the position that the author did not make an error but intentionally took the information from Josephus in this topical order. As will be shown in the finale of this series, there are good reasons why he must have felt he had to try something other than error to explain the usage thereby! Since he doesn't spell out those reasons himself, however... Part 7 -- Thoroughly Sniffing The Thesis (Or Huffing It, Maybe) Let’s spell out the implications of Dr. Pervo’s ...

Note: Part 5 of this series can be found here. It discusses how Dr. Richard Pervo, in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts , and in regard to his theory of the author of Acts depending on reference to Josephus, ends up having to having to appeal to argument B not only to make argument A seem more plausible but to answer in a non sequitur fashion an oncoming critique of part of his argument for A--when the reason he explicitly started with A was to help make subsequent arguments for the dating of Acts post-Antiquities, including argument B, seem more plausible! So having spun the reader's head around a few times, he plows onward now to his strongest primary evidence. Part 6 -- Error, Error! (Or, wait, not...??) Having quickly leapt away from trying to explain how the 400 number can even plausibly fit into his theory (answering expected critiques of his argument there by spinning the reader around with circular plausibility appeals to a completely different dating argument which has noth...

Note: Part 4 of this series can be found here. It discusses how Dr. Richard Pervo, in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts , ends up having to imagine a reason for why the author of Acts would intentionally change a rhetorically impressive generalization from Josephus into a sober and realistic number--for a purpose that directly contravenes the author's own enumerations just previously in his own narrative. We'll be getting back to that problem again later... Part 5 -- Circling The Shell Game Around Rather than face this clear problem with his explanation, Dr. Pervo hops over to a completely different argument: Acts 5 shows Luke only knew about one census, namely the one at the time of Judas the Galilean, so Luke had to have been either mistaken or just making things up for the GosLuke prologue, so there, nyah! Or words to that effect; what Dr. Pervo is aiming at, is to strengthen the appearance of his thesis concerning Luke’s source for Acts 5 by appealing to a different argument...

Note: Part 3 of this series can be found here. It discusses how Dr. Richard Pervo, in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts , spends a surprising amount of time and effort trying to sheerly imagine connections between the Lukan and the Josephan references to a rebel Theudas. His attempt does not end well. {lopsided g} Part 4 -- Of Course, There Are Some Differences... “There are, of course, differences between the two accounts,” Dr. Pervo admits (p 157)--having already effectively admitted that one such huge and glaring difference is the terminology used to describe Theudas, despite his attempts to insist on a startling similarity between them. Another such difference is that one account talks about a Theudas rebelling before Judas the Galilean, and one talks about a Theudas rebelling afterward . This is not a small difference! But more on this and its implications for Dr. Pervo’s thesis later. Yet another important difference, one that Dr. Pervo tries to gloss over the implications of,...

Note: Part 2 of this series can be found here. It discusses how Dr. Richard Pervo, in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts , begins his argument for Lukan dependence on Josephus, in regard to the 'Theudas' reference in Acts 5, by hugely begging the question in favor of his own hypothesis. Part 3 -- A Magical Imagination Dr. Pervo retorts against Dr. Bruce’s second point, that Theudas is an unusual name. I consider this his strongest critique of Dr. B (so far as presented in DA on this topic); but Dr. P neglects to mention (as Dr. Bruce himself most likely remembered) that it is an unusual form of a more common set of names for which it might be substituted for purposes of better identification--one such name being Judas, not incidentally. Ironically, we do know of at least one Judas (son of Ezekias) leading a rebellion prior to Judas the Galilean--thanks to Josephus! This leads to Dr. Bruce’s third point, namely that even Jospehus doesn’t bother to name all the rebellions (the “t...

Note: Part 1 of this series can be found here. It introduces the data, the problem, and the solution proposed (among a few other people) by Dr. Richard Pervo, most notably in his 2006 edition of Dating Acts . Recapping the final paragraph from last time... Dr. Pervo’s thesis is that the order of mention by Gamaliel, first Theudas and then Judas the Galilean, suggests (or, for Dr. P, practically demands) that Luke borrowed this information from Josephus, specifically from Book 20 (written very late, indeed the last book of Antiquities completed before Josephus’ death). The main positive evidence in favor of this thesis (unless Dr. P brings out stronger positive evidence where I haven’t been able to read him yet), is that Josephus happens to mention Judas the Galilean after writing about Theudas the (messianic) “magician”; thus, in a trivially sequential way, first Theudas is mentioned, then Judas the Galilean. Whereas, if Luke was really writing with actual living knowledge of conditio...

Part 1 -- The Data, The Problem, and The Thesis My friend Victor Reppert, over at Dangerous Idea , has been recently engaged in a series of posts on historical analysis of the accuracy of the New Testament; and the thorny topic of Theudas came up again a week or two ago, this time in context of Richard I. Pervo’s thesis that the author of Acts of the Apostles knew about Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews and so must have composed Acts sometime substantially after Ant.’s publication. I am a bit handicapped here in analyzing Dr. Pervo’s thesis, since I don’t have access to a university library; I have only found access to (a very large) part of the relevant chapter in Dating Acts (thanks to Amazon’s Search Inside feature), and no access at all yet to his later Acts: A Commentary (part of Hermeneia’s Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible )--nor do I much fancy buying one or both books merely to assess this one thesis. Hopefully some of our readers will have one or both books ...

After entering a google search, I ran across a post on Debunking Christianity on Josephus. The author -- Harry McCall -- titled his post “Why Josephus’ So-called Testimonium Flavianum Must be Rejected.” The sum total of the post, however, was a few snippets from a leading Josephan scholar, Louis Feldman, about problems with the authenticity of the Testimonium. Those familiar with my writings will know that I have a lengthy article online defending the partial authenticity of the Testimonium. (JP Holding was also nice enough to invite me to revise the article to defend both Josephan references to Jesus in his book, Shattering the Christ Myth ). In the comments of Harry McCall's DB post, John Loftus directed McCall to my online article, stating, “before you posted this I was persuaded by most of what Christopher Price wrote about Josephus' passage here. Would you care to comment?.” In response, McCall said my article was “filled with false claims and mis-statements out of...