Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is not taken seriously by most historians because there is some very significant evidence you have to discount in Josephus. He was a Jewish general born right around when Jesus was crucified who worked with sources in Judaea to write his history and he refers to Jesus twice. The first passage is clearly corrupted, but the existence of the corrupted passage is not a random insertion but a replacement of Joesphus' original writing about Jesus. That in itself is still notable as a kind of evidence, even if the original text is lost. The second is a description of the crucifixion of James, Jesus' brother. The second passage is consistent stylistically and isn't doubted as authentic by experts. I believe that Carrier tried to claim it was some other James brother of Jesus whose stories match, but by coincidence or something, I mostly only recall feeling pity for Carrier when I saw what he'd sunk to there.

Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.

Carrier addresses Josephus, both in the On the Historicity of Jesus [0], and in his blog posts [1]. His points, as I understand them, are that: 1) The first Josephus passage — the so called Testimonium Flavianum — is an insertion by Christian scribes. He gives stylistic arguments for why this is the case: both by how dissimilar this passage is from Josephus's style, and by how similar it is to the Gospel of Luke; and 2) In the second passage, which mentions James, "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ", the reference to Jesus had originally been a marginal note by a Christian scribe that subsequently got interpolated into the main text.

This idea of an interpolated marginal note is Carrier's own contribution, first published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2012. While elegant, is not the only explanation. In his blog [1], Carrier references several recent publications (peer-reviewed, as he likes to emphasize), including one published in Journal of Early Christian History in 2017 by a South African historian Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, who argues that the James passage is a forgery, of which his prime suspect is Origen [2]. So, you can see that Carrier isn't the only one among modern academic historians of antiquity who casts doubt on Josephus passages.

---

[0] Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana in On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014, p. 332-342

[1] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071

[2] Abstract at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1.... Full text can be found in: Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted, 2020, of which a pirated pdf exists online

The Testimonium Flavianum is clearly questionable, no one accepts it as genuine, though the question of whence it came is interesting and ultimately IMO slightly strengthens the historicist case, but since it's clearly not a reliable passage it's not worth dwelling on.

The only really significant question is the account of James. He dismisses it because he has to, so claiming it's a forgery is another attempt to dismiss evidence. He's not a real philologist, it's great that he managed to get a peer reviewed journal to accept his work, but it's still a crank conspiracy theory attempting to wave away evidence. If denying evidence to prop up a conspiracy theory is your thing, then Carrier is great, but in truth all his work is weak and a waste of any serious person's time and you'd be better off dropping the conspiracies and fringe scholars and learning about the evidence objectively. The truth is more interesting than Carrier's conspiracies once you learn it.

> The only really significant question is the account of James.

One passage. One. In a text, where the other passage is accepted to be forgery, and which comes to us as a copy by Christian scribes. And if it is specifically Carrier that you dismiss, take a look at Nicholas Allen's recent book that I referenced in my previous comment. Allen uses arguments that are independent from Carrier's and comes to a conclusion that is even more radical than his — while Carrier accepts the James passage on the whole and only suggests that the "who was called Christ" line started as a marginal note by a Christian peruser of the text, Allen argues that the whole James passage is a forgery. And he seems to be a modern mainstream scholar trained in philology and ancient and classical history.

I haven't kept up, sounds dubious to me. You and Carrier are both far more invested in the conspiracy theory than the evidence, trying to discredit sources rather than actually read and understand them, more like a religious apologist than a scholar. It's a bad look.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com