It was not that long that scholars said the bible was almost perfect. Today we have many scholars who still say Jesus did those miracles. I wont deny many of these are xian fundies but still, it shows scholars are people as well and they arent always honest. There are a lot of nutty muslim scholars, i dont believe them, but still they say many things aswell that are obviously stupid like beliving mohammad split the moon in half as it is writtein hte koran.
I don't care what fundies say...they don't follow historical methodology; neither do crank writers who have an interesting idea. History isn't anything goes. You can't throw out an internally-consistent well-supported picture of the past that explains the preponderance of the evidence for something that does a piss-poor job doing the same thing. That doesn't mean that the current picture of things is perfect, or can't be altered, not at all. It means that the new explanation has to do a better job explaining things than the current understanding.
It's like throwing out everything we know about geology and paleontology and evolution because of one anomalous fossil that might suggest humans lived at the sapome time as dinosaurs (and the fossil itself is dubious because of reasons xyz).
That's what I'm talking about.
After all taht lets forget about this appeal to authority and actually look at the items of interest.
No appeal to authority at all.....I am appealing to the body of research and knowledge that already exists that any new theory or idea that radically wants to revise history needs to explain in a better way than the older paradigm.
Are we to believe that the Romans were incapable of hiring the best minds to produce these texts. If theres anyone with deep pockets surely it must be the imperial government. THe facts are education was very much a privlege of the rich, the rich had a best of interest in cooperating w/ the Romans, to keep the status quo.
Yeah, such a massive conspiracy to simulate not just a body of literature but a body of literature that looks like it was written by many people over many years from a wide range of intellectual and social positions.....kind of like how fundies think God simulated those fossils to look just like they were millions of years old to fool those silly evolutionists. In both cases, huuuuge special pleading there. Maybe all of classical Greek literature was faked in a single monastery in the Middle Ages too. Maybe all of American literature was written by Stephen King and his buddies, and just made it look like a HUGE gamut of texts that came from many, many people from all walks of life. If you entertain such an outlandish notion, your evidence for it better be good. Otherwise, why even think such a thing?
We have a certain poster here who disagrees with Neo-Babylonian and Persian chronology and he believes there was a massive conspiracy in antiquity to fake all the chronological records to insert a century or so, even things like business documents. All the evidence that proves his chronology wrong is just dismissed a priori as faked, and the chronology is instead based on a set of anomalies and coincidences. It's the same story. It isn't about assessing the preponderance of the evidence. Rather, the preponderance of the evidence is just dismissed cavalierly. There had better be really good evidence that ALL that evidence has been faked, but it just isn't there.
So...I call "special pleading".
His book only quotes the gospels and mostly follows only jesus life. I think you have confused yourself here. The story of jesus life only appears in the gospels, we cant really count the remainder as really biographical, the mentions in paul are a joke.
No, I do think he thinks Paul was a Flavian forgery too....he had a chapter on the authorship of the NT iirc. Anyway, you logically can't have Paul being a Christian in the 50s-60s, if the Flavians didn't invent Jesus until the 70s, so....logically the whole thing was faked by the same party.
You are entitled to your opinion but first you must make your case. Youve wasted 1/4 of your reply telling us about Fomenko. Your 2nd para is very long and completely without any examples. Your opinions about how different religions form their theology are well interseting but completely ignore the Titus v Jesus parallels. I will ignore this paragraph as its without any hard facts, i dont think i can honestly say much more without getting diverted. I notice your remainder has scriptures and more details which i will attempt to comment upon.
Well, too bad then. My purpose was to explain why I found the thesis pitiful. So the big part of it was methodology, which was deeply flawed, and so that's a big part of what I wanted to talk about. I know you don't care about methodology and just want a point-by-point rebuttal of specifics in the book, which I can't really do too well because I don't have the book, and really it's beside the point for me because the problem is much deeper than just the rightness or wrongness of specific claims.
Freely ignore the points I made if you wish.
Come on you are being unfair. You very well know i was referring to the fact there were many individuals in Israel called Jesus and we cant assume that Tacitus as previous quoted was referring to THE one and only jesus, because there were no others. If anything your example shows that names are common and rarely unique especially if they are a common name in that society. jesus was a common name. Your example shows this with your examples of John. Most xians unfortunately dont realise that Jesu was a common name.
No I'm being perfectly fair. This is precisely the point I'm making about Atwill. Lots of people were named Jesus, lots of totally unrelated people. So you can't just use the name as the basis for combining or linking totally unrelated Jesuses together.
But perhaps his largest error of this sort (and overall) is finding commonality in names. He marvels that there was a "Jesus" who preached and a "Jesus" who also led rebels against Titus on the Sea of Galilee [43] -- oblivious to the point that (as we have heard so much about, related to the "James ossuary") "Jesus" was as common a name for Jews of that period as "Bob" is for men today. He makes the same error concerning "Mary" (a name held by up to a third and at least a fourth of Jewish women of this era; thus, despite Atwill, there is no oddity in two sisters having variations of that same name [88], and his argument that the Romans turned "Mary" into a "nickname for female rebels" [90] is shown erroneous). And the same error is made with "Simon." Atwill did no checking into this subject beyond the list of Biblical names in a chart from Webster's [302] and so errs badly when he declares how unlikely it is that the NT and Josephus would record so many Jewish people with the same names.
Tacitus does not refer to the name "Jesus" at all. He refers to Christians. Christians who got their start in Judea during the reign of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor. Tacitus refutes Atwill. But I'm sure this can be hand-waved easily as well.
Atwill only writes about the gospels. We arent really talking about Luke. can we actually focus on the gospels first.
LOL. Luke isn't a gospel. Gotcha.
So some body used Josephus to write Luke. Its fairly possible that some romans did this. So they screwed up so what. Everybody makes mistakes. Are you stating that hte Romans didnt make mistakes.. i dont understand how this shows that the Romans didnt writ e the gospels.
It's also fairly possible that a Jew writing in Greek about events in pre-70 Judea would use something written by a Jew in Greek about events in pre-70 Judea. Explains the literary dependence without resorting to an outlandish theory.
My point in mentioning those parallels is to show what real parallels look like.
You have failed to show a single scripture from Mt, Mk, Lu or Jo that is completely flawed in the parallels of Titus campaign.
I mentioned a few examples of claimed parallels that are dubious, that pale in comparison to real parallels, that are the kind that one could easily find between two stories if one stretches things far enough and cherry picks things as parallels that don't necessarily make much internal sense. Doesn't meet the especially high burden of proof that the thesis demands.
You still seem to think I'm trying to refute Atwill.
Hey, maybe the BP oil spill never happened. Read the novel Moby Dick alongside the news reports of the oil spill....the novel when read together with the news reports creates a satire lampooning the oil companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weekinreview/13kennedy.html?pagewanted=all (This article is all about parallels between Moby Dick and the BP disaster)
BTW, the parallels with Moby Dick are not really that close....mostly thematic. Wanna bet I can ransack my way through the pages of Moby Dick and find random words or phrases that create a wide range of coincidences with Deepwater Horizon, the Gulf, BP, Tony Hayward, etc. Kinda interesting how the oil rig punctures the oil deposit, like the whalers shoot their harpoons at the oil-bearing whale....hmmm the whale is white which is an in-joke to the fact that petroleum is black, Ahab took dangerous risks to pursue the whale, BP took dangerous risks trying to tap the oil deposit, the deposit sent an explosion that destroyed and sank Deepwater Horizon just as the whale sank the Pequod, the Pequod sank in DEEP WATER and the ship earlier sighted a ship on the HORIZON. The first mate is named Peleg which when read in connection with the Deepwater Horizon story in the Gulf of Mexico produces the in-joke peligrosa "perilous, dangerous", as what some Mexicans along the Gulf would have said about what happened, and this is confirmed proof positive in what Bildad says to him: ""Peleg! Peleg! thou thyself hast seen many a perilous time" (chapter 18). "He drilled deep down and blasted all reason out of me!" says the mainmast in chapter 38, obviously the drilling for oil in the fake "Deepwater Horizon" story is a spoof of this line. The whalers from the whaling oil companies were "mutually cutting each other on the high seas .... and all the time insulting, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's rig" (chapter 53), an obvious allusion to the competition between the petroleum companies and the criticism BP received regaring its oil rig. Hmm the word "rig" occurs a lot in Moby Dick...."Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy!" (chapter 40). "Bang it" refers to the oil rig explosion, as "rig it" indicates. "Dig it" of course is the oil drilling. "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf" (chapter 135). The story about injured birds in the Gulf must be about this. Ahab is told that "The oil in the hold is leaking, sir" and he says "Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! Yet I don't stop to plug my leak, for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull" (chapter 109). Obviously the story about the oil leak parodies this, with BP not caring about the leak, not taking the risk seriously, and knowing that finding the leak so deep underwater would be very hard. "The leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy water" (chapter 54), need I go on? The BP oil spill is a fabrication. Who cares if there is supposed evidence that it happened....I've got parallels from Moby Dick! Q.E.D.
Anyway those parallels sound about as good as claiming that the story of Jesus calling fishermen to discipleship on the Sea of Galilee is paralleled by a story about a battle on the Sea of Galilee that maims and kills Jews who are trying to swim.
Again how does this make it impossible for the Romans to not have leveraged some of these compatible ideas in their creation ? it is irrelevant that other philosphies or religions were peaceful, that does not exclude the possibility. Interesting, surely, historical, yes, a case against the Romans, sorry no banana.
Cart before the horse. There's no substantive evidence that the Romans did this at all. I don't have to show it's impossible at all; the burden is on those making the claim that it did happen. And you miss the point I was making. It was Atwill who felt he had to come up with his theory in order to account for what he believed early Judaism to be, an impression that was actually quite wrong.
YOu have completely missed the point that the Romans, did know the Bible. They were not idiots
What little is recorded about the attitudes of the non-Christian Roman elite depicts them as having a very superficial knowledge of Christians (see the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, they didn't know much about this group of people), and they loved to repeat false rumors like Christians hate all mankind, they are firebugs who tip over candles (which is kind of relevant to the scapegoating of Christians by Nero), etc.
Someone should have clued Tacitus in on this massive conspiracy to fabricate Christianity. He stupidly thought that "Judea was the origin of this evil destructive superstition" and although "repressed", it "erupted again through the city of Rome where all that is horrible and shameful floods together and is celebrated". Silly Tacitus, the Flavians didn't repress it, they CREATED it -- not in Judea but in Rome! Right under your nose!
Josephus by himself is probably more qualified about jewish than nay modern scholar, simply because he was there, and had access to material we can only dream of. Living at the time he would have seen and heard things that have been lost through time and our modern shcolars can never hope to know. TO continue on and on hardly disproves the possibility that the Romans wrote the gospels. They were educated, they had the resources.
Burden....of.....proof.....
I believe that Josephus also invented Judaism. All of it. The whole shebang. He wrote the entire OT, and also planted those Dead Sea Scrolls too. He was a smart guy, don't underestimate his intelligence. He knew how to imitate older styles of writing in order to make it look like there were manuscripts older than the first century; he used old parchments too. He was creative enough to think up all the really complex stuff in the OT that seems to take different points of view and seem for all the world like they were written by many different people. Then on the weekends, he translated all that stuff into Greek and came out with the Septuagint, but being oh so careful to make it look like the Septuagint had a lot of textual variation and translation errors. Then he was able to get all those Jews out there to stop worshipping Zeus and adopt this new Hebrew god he invented.
Pretty cool story huh? Now I don't expect to lift a finger to substantiate this. It doesn't matter how implausible this is. But it's up to you to disprove it. (And most of the evidence that would disprove this I can claim was faked anyway).
They knew which scriptures to use and promote and which to leave out. We all know that Mt badly twists many scriptures like the riding on the two donkeys and others, because he must find parallels to prove jesus in prophecy even if the references are wrong and dishonest. We have the same dishonesty in the twisting of Micah 5 which supposedly predicts the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. The gospels writers tried really hard to impress prophecy on the reader that i will agree. They tried their best, it would be hard to imagine anyone else doing better with what they had to work with.
That is in no way evidence of Flavian forgery. That is very very typical, midrash is just the thing we would expect for a genuine Jewish writing from the period. Jonah cribs all over the place from the OT; that's an example of fictional midrash (about a historical figure from Deuteronomistic History) like the gospels. 1 Enoch too (the scene in the first chapter is based heavily on Deuteronomy). The narrative in Tobit is loaded with allusions to Genesis and Job. The account of the persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes in Daniel 11-12 depicts it as a fulfillment of the Suffering Servant prophecy in Deutero-Isaiah. The Dead Sea Scrolls indulge in pesher interpretation of recent events as fulfillments of OT prophecy. The legendary stories of the rabbis in the Mishnah draw on OT material. You can see exactly the same process continuing in later Christian literature. The stories about Judas in Papias and later writers elaborate the narratives further by borrowing details and information from the OT. The Matryrdom of Polycarp cribs from Daniel 3, 6 as well as the passion narratives in order to make Polycarp imitate Jesus' death. The infancy gospels borrow narrative elements from the OT (such as Anna being based on the Hannah from the story of Samuel). So how is this different? Rather show me things that go against the grain of what one might expect for a first century Jewish writing, that might independently point to a Flavian, non-Jewish provenance. Stuff like....I don't know..... sustained linguistic interference from Latin throughout the corpus, evidence of a pagan Tendenz, etc. You can say that the Romans had the resources and could have gotten a bunch of immensely competent Jews to write something that sounds just like something that Jews would write, but that's no different from how it would be if Jews wrote it themselves on their own. It's more question-begging and again I am asked to disprove what is already patently the less parsimonious option. Parsimony counts.
The fact that jews rejected Jesus today, shows that he did not match the criteria of the prophecies but the authors used the text anyway.
Umm, wow. I don't think Jews today agree with how the Essenes interpreted OT prophecies as pertaining to their own day either, but that doesn't mean anything. It isn't a matter of "matching criteria of prophecies"; the Christians creatively drew on OT material that often weren't prophecies at all to compose both stories about Jesus as well as interpret their meaning (christological as well as soteriological). Christians similarly don't care about how rabbinical Jews used midrash to invent creative midrashic stories about the OT; they aren't rejecting those stories, they just don't care. The two belong to different religious traditions separated now for almost two thousand years.
YOu have again failed to address a single point that shows why it is impossible for the Romans to write this text.
Misplaced burden of proof.
I didn't say it was impossible. I said that it is so implausible that to think it happened that way is to disregard most of what we know about the NT. History is about assessing the preponderance of evidence and likelihoods. The burden is on you to show that this theory explains the history better than the alternative. It is inherently unlikely. So it loses out in evidentiary evaluation. You still don't realize that you have to show how this is a better explanation of the given facts in order to be taken seriously.
Maybe JCanon is right too that every single datum that points to 604 BC as the first year of Nebuchadnezzar (including the thousands of business tablets) was faked in a massive conspiracy in ancient times. It ain't bloody likely though.
You have failed to show any passage from the gospels are is a compelte fail for Titus.
Misplaced burden of proof. Etc.
You have failed to explain the pro Roman attitude and directions from Jesus.
I already did at length. Explained by both prophetic models from the OT and quietist response to political oppression. BTW, I forgot to mention in my last post that Josephus mentions two instances of non-violent passive protest against the Romans (kind of like the sit-ins in the sixties), as just around the time Jesus supposedly lived (first regarding the standards introduced during Pontius Pilate's tenure and second regarding the proposed statue of Gaius in the Jerusalem Temple). And both protests had successful results.
The texts blame the jews for JC crucifiction, which is v strange.
Why is it strange? The narrative depicts the Sanhedrin as handing Jesus over to the Roman authorities on the accusation of sedition. And incidentally the OT prophets were also persecuted by fellow Jews, think of the trials of Jeremiah. That is kind of the point made in Matthew 23:34-37. And like Jesus, Jeremiah declared that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed because of the unfaithfulness of the Jewish leaders.
cameo appearnces of jospehus embedded in character naming puns.
Yeah right.
Jesus is more concerned about protecting Roman interests than encouraging social change that would actually help the jews or poor slaves.
Funny then how "the poor" was the focus of so much of the gospel in the synoptics, and how the early Christian movement created a community that prioritized the poor.
You have spent way to much time away from the gospels, discussing jewish religious development and messianic expectations. Not once did you actually discuss anything about Titus campaign and its parallels with Jesus ministry which is what the entire theory is about.
Yeah sad, isn't it, that that is what the "entire theory" is based on. (And yes, I did discuss some of the "parallels" from what I remember from the book)
I talked so much about other stuff because, as I've said quite a few times already, there is a shitload of stuff that you have to ignore for the hypothesis to be correct. If I am going to say why I find it ridiculous, I am going to have to talk about that other stuff and methodology.
I would give you a fail because of this. Its your privlege to not reply, but if someone asks you a question, then reply to that, dont talk about other stuff even if it is interesting
LOL. IOW...."Don't try to put a lot of thought into explaining why you found an idea hard to believe (a streeeeeetch, as I put it) by getting down to the logical and methodological problems rendering that idea implausible. I don't care about that."
The easist example of the pun on Arimathea= Josephus you have completely ignored. I suppose its unanswerable which is why you avoided it.
LOL I already said it was philologically implausible and lacking any narrative connection (as I said, did Josephus offer to bury Titus in his own family tomb? what's the connection beyond the purported sound similarity).
Some scholars have noticed this resemblance, there are plenty of refs on wiki for example.
Where? Show me an actual peer-reviewed scholarly source that makes that claim.
If J of A is Josephus he doesnt have to bury Titus. Titus doesnt have to die because Jesus died. That wouldnt make sense.
That's my point! It doesn't make sense. Josephus has no analogous role to Joseph of Arimathea.
You have missed the point that, that the gospels tell a story of a peaceful messiah. The R are trying to show the jews that their messiah has come and he is telling them not to fight, but accept their lot, pay taxes etc.
Funny. On the one hand you complain I talk about all this "other stuff", yet you say I missed the point even though much of that "other stuff" was to explain the quietist political stance of the synoptics and what all that actually means within the context of Second Temple Judaism. I was addressing that very question. And I showed how that stance was not one that embraced the Roman empire but in fact expected its demise in the near future.
You also havecompeltely ignored any attempt to show that the gospels are not beneficial to the Romans.
And you have completely ignored my attempt to show that the eschatological expectation in the synoptics was that the era of Roman rule was coming to an end.
You have also completely ignored the close family connection between xianity and the flavians. no commentary about the 2nd pope being Clement, or the first cath saint being Vespasian sister or cousin(sorry cant recall exaclty the realtionship) and all the sheer volume of saints.
Which has nothing to do with the composition of the gospels unless you already accept the premise that the Flavians wrote them. It's like noting that there are a lot of Jews in business and entertainment, which is supposed to show that a cabal of Jews have conspired to control commerce and industry; similarly, there were some Flavians who were Christians, ergo, a cabal of Flavians conspired to invent Christianity. Why is it implausible that some Flavians (which was not just a family but a gens) converted to Christianity? The church at Rome was huge. The two you mentioned (Titus Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla) were husband and wife. Dio Cassius wrote about them:
"Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and married to Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. The charge brought against them both was that of atheism (atheotès), a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of these were put to death, and the rest were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria".
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Let's see if I have this right....The Flavians invent Christianity, knowing its a joke, then two Flavians convert to this phony baloney religion, and this is somehow evidence that the Flavians invented it, so I guess they were supposed to join it cause it's a "Flavian thang"....even though as Tacitus shows the non-Christian Romans regarded it a disgusting vile superstition, but then when another Flavian became emperor he killed one of his own family members for belonging to this religion that they themselves had created and tried to promote (forget that Tacitus says that it was suppressed not promoted), and banished the other to an island who then....wait a minute!! why is a Flavian lashing out against a religion that his family tried to promote and was all about making teh Jooz looooove the Romans? Those silly Flavians!!!
