Non Chtristian sources for Livingston was Re: Josephus
Helen Willis errancy@infidels.org
Tue, 04 May 1999 15:13:39 -0400 (00925863219, 372F46E2.4FC3A77B@bright.net)
I snipped a bunch
> LIVINGSTON
> I think the problem is that you are forced to make too many assumptions
> about the source of these quotes. I will grant you that Suetonius and
> Pliny do little more than give us information on Christian beliefs,
> however I don't think that this is necessarily the case with Josephus and
> Tacitus.
HELEN:
Both wrote their works in Rome after 90AD. Here's Groliers listing for Tacitus. His
passing reference to Jesus was in his Annals. I think as part of his discussion of
the oppressions under Nero.
Tacitus, Cornelius
{tas'-i-tuhs}
Cornelius Tacitus, AD c.56-c.115, a Roman senator and one of the greatest Roman
historians, lived through the tyrannical rule of Domitian and the golden age of
Trajan. He was praetor (88), consul (97), and governor of the province of Asia
(c.112). His short monographs Germany (98) and Dialogue on Orators (between c.98
and 102) and the eulogy Life of Agricola (98) are important sources for knowledge
about ancient Germany, Roman oratory, and Roman Britain. His two major works, the
Annals and the Histories, cover the period from the death of Augustus (AD 14) to
the death of Domitian (96). Today about one-third of the Annals is missing; the
surviving four and one-half books of the Histories go only to the beginning (69-70)
of Vespasian's reign and deal with the civil war after the death of Nero. In his
succinct and pointed style, Tacitus contrasts the often-imaginary liberty of the
Roman republic and the tyranny of such emperors as Tiberius and Nero.
HELEN, again:
Now where are you arguing that this fellow got his information from if not either
the Christians or those that persecuted them. Let's say for a moment that there
where records of individual crucifixion in Palestine prior to the Revolt and that
these records survived the Revolt, why would Tacitus have gone and checked this
record for a minor point that was well off his main point? No, in 90 AD if he had
asked in Rome what the Christians believed, most people would not have heard of
them, but the folks responsible for public order would have told him that they
worshiped a criminal executed by Pilate as god. He would have roared with laughter
and left it at that. And those that keep public order would have gotten their
information by asking Christians, probably with torture, so although it is
indirect, the source for his information is probably the Christians themselves.
JOHN
> I don't think that we can just assume that they would have
> gotten their data from the Christians. Josephus only lived a couple of
> generations after Jesus, but stil within the lifetime of James. I think
> it very reasonable to say that he might be an independent source.
HELEN:
But he didn't write his works until 94 AD when he had lived in Rome for several
years. He doesn't say when he learned the thing he is supposed to claim about
Jesus, so the source for this information can not be dated before 90 in Rome. There
are two quotes, we been through all this before. On the first that deals with
Jesus directly, Josephus wrote his work to convince the Roman authorities to be
nice to the Jews because they had a noble history. He identifies himself as a
Pharisee. By the 90's the Christians had been declared heretics and denied access
to the synagogues. Moreover, they were disliked by the Roman authorities. Josephus
would not have gushed over Jesus. He would not have called him the Christ. This
first quote does both of these things, so just about everyone, even most
Christians, believe that at least part of this quote was a later addition. Moreover
Josephus also says that there were gentile followers of Jesus from the very
beginning and this is part of what some claim to be the original core. This is not
something a late Christian would have likely said, but almost all theories for a
real Jesus claim that the original Christians were all Jewish and Jesus didn't like
gentiles. The most logical explanation for this statement is that this may well be
original Josephus and that it's an anachronism that tells us that when he first
heard of Christians they had already had gentile followers for quite a while. This
would suggest that if this quote is authentic Josephus he didn't know of the
Christians prior to they being a well establish cult with many Gentile followers.
By most dating systems, he learned of them no earlier than 75-80 AD, probably
either during or after the Revolt and perhaps much later. The most likely source
for this story is the Romans whom he betrayed his Jewish people to serve. And they
would have got it from the Christians. The second quote tells of the death of a
fellow called James, who has a brother called Jesus. This Jesus is a different
Jesus that is made high priest at the end of the paragraph because this Jesus is
called the Christ althought the context of the story would seem to make it about
the high priest. Now, I also believe that the death of James in Josephus is also
different from the death of James historically taught by the church.
JOHN
> However this doesn't even deal with the strongest evidence for Jesus'
> existence. Even if Josephus and Tacitus were dependant on the
> Christians, who were the Christians dependant on? We have four different
> communities of Christians Gnostic, Jewish, Q, and Pauline. For your
> hypotheses to hold any water, you must show that all these traditions are
> based on a single tradition or person other than Jesus.
> For me, instead of hypothesizing all these are part of a big
> interconnected conspiracy, the easiest answer is that there was a Jewish
> teacher who inadvertently or not founded all these different beliefs. I
> ask again, what kind of evidence that would
> reasonable to obtain in the ancient world for a person of Jesus alleged
> circumstances would lead you to believe that he really did exist?
HELEN:
First, I think that there were a bunch small Jewish cults called by the writers of
the Talmud, ha-Nosti. These groups had been started before 80 BC and they had had
a early leader named Jesus who was killed by some Jewish power group, either the
rabbis or a king who was also high priest named Janneaus (real fellow, well
documented) around 80 BC. Janneaus is well remembered for crucifying 800 religious
Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem in 88 BC. Now they had other leaders and
teachers as well and probably had many traditions and beliefs. The apparently were
in general messianic, apocalyptic and not particularly well educated.
Second, Jesus was an incredibly common name among Jewish folks in the period
between 100BC and 100AD. I came up with a dozen or more Jesuses running around
doing things that might have become part of the Jesus myth of the Christians from
Josephus' Antiquities for Ed a while back. It not hard to imagine hundreds of
teachers named Jesus who may have added to the Jesus myth that we don't even begin
to know of.
Third, part of the argument for Q is based on the lack of agreement about
biographical details in the gospels. Q is supposed to be a book of quotes from
"Jesus" with no biographical details included.
So what we have some evidence for is a group of Jewish cults that go back to before
80 BC, a book of quotes attributed to a guy named Jesus that apparently existed
before 60 AD, the letters of Paul some of which are real and date before 65 AD.
Paul doesn't mention any biographical details about Jesus other than that he was
crucified. I have been of late chewing over the idea that someone posted that Q
seems to read more like a Greek sage's quotes than a Hebrew teacher. I wonder what
the experts would think of the idea that even Q itself may have been a composite of
earlier works.
I don't know how much you have read of cult writing in this century or apocryphal
writings of any century but they tend to borrow extensively from other sources,
both written material and common verbally past on myth have this strange way of
being passed from group to group. Take for example the Book of Mormon. It has whole
sections lifted straight from the King James Bible. It has stories and ideas about
the Indians descending from the lost tribes of Israel borrowed from a book written
by the minister of a church that J. Smith used to attend in summer. It had a common
piece of folk myth, that there was gold in the mounds. And if we studied it
carefully we could probably find several other sources for much of what's in the
BOM. This is typical of a invented religious book.
Yet, the name of the professor that appears in the beginning of the book supposedly
confirmed the book is in reformed Egyptian is that of a real man. (He got very
upset that his name was used.) It is not uncommon for this kind of made up myth to
add to various fictional sources the names of real people and real historical
details to make their work seem more historical. Was there a Jewish teacher named
Jesus in the first half of the first century? Undoubtedly, as I said it was a very
common name. Is the Jesus of the gospels based on any real person? Highly
questionable.
Helen
hhiwater@bright.net