My first comment is after a reading of an English translation of TF, before Tom Schmidt comes in. The rest involves gratitude or minor nuance to what Tom Schmidt says.
Breaking: The Earliest Non-Christian Testimony to Jesus may be Authentic (Josephus)
Sean McDowell | 27.VI.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwyFaJcapcI
0:15 Miracle working is not affirmed in the Testimonium Flavianum.
"Wonderful works" is in the original "paradoxa erga" and could from a non-Christian, even a denier of the miracles, refer to things like eating without washing hands or the two cleansings of the temple.
As to "was the Messiah", note the tense. I think there is a Jewish tenet that in each generation there is a claimant to the throne of David, a potential Messiah, so to speak, and that Josephus was saying a thing like "yes, he was the Messiah, but he missed the chance" ...
As to "appeared on the third day" could be a reference to what Christians believed, not necessarily sth that Josephus wholeheartedly agreed with.
Also, a text in the OT says Samuel appeared, and not all exegetes agree this was actually the soul of Samuel in Endor, some say even on this occasion the witch conjured a demon. Josephus need not have been taking sides on this issue.
I looked up the Greek text in D M Murdock (on Academia), and she makes an affair of the two negatives, saying they protest against someone else, whom Josephus didn't name. But Josephus could have simply referenced the test of Gamaliel. If he knew about the test, and if he knew in context that other Messianic claimants were returned to nobodies, a kind of footnotes in history, he would have noted the contrast.
27:04 5500 hapax legomena within the corpus flavianum?
29:11 Ah, you do mean a Christian edited out "was thought to be" as offensive, in not the Latin, not the Syriac, but the Byzantine or Greek reception of the text?
My own hunch back when I came to debates on the subject would have been "he was the Christ according to ..." (insert derogatory description of Christians).
And that phrase was then considered too offensive and was edited out.
44:42 Phainetai moi kenos isos theoisin ... Sappho doesn't state the bridgroom of her former protégé (to which she was still ssa) IS the like of the gods, she just saying that's how it seems to her in her present state of mind.
Yes, thank you, I hadn't noticed myself, but Josephus uses the same verb.
48:55 Josephus sounds a lot like Cicero saying things like:
"I was mentored by ... " no, I'll give the Latin paragraph:
Q. Mucius augur multa narrare de C. Laelio socero suo memoriter et iucunde solebat nec dubitare illum in omni sermone appellare sapientem; ego autem a patre ita eram deductus ad Scaevolam sumpta virili toga, ut, quoad possem et liceret, a senis latere numquam discederem; itaque multa ab eo prudenter disputata, multa etiam breviter et commode dicta memoriae mandabam fierique studebam eius prudentia doctior. Quo mortuo me ad pontificem Scaevolam contuli, quem unum nostrae civitatis et ingenio et iustitia praestantissimum audeo dicere. Sed de hoc alias; nunc redeo ad augurem.
(Laelius de Amicitia)
Jews in the day of Josephus were imitating Roman nobility in being highly snobbish about social connections, and this is to be expected from idolaters who had just said "we have no king but Caesar" ...
50:09 Obviously Hanan Ben Hanan would know he hadn't been able to end Christianity by killing St. James the taller.
To whose tomb I went in 2004. Pope Leo XIII has authentified, yes, St. James really, after being killed in Jerusalem, was buried in Galicia, Spain.
As a good fan of homeschooling, I have obviously also noted that his successor Joshua Ben Gamla was the first to oblige Jewish boys to a school system still used today. Meaning, the Holy Family was NOT under this obligation decades earlier, meaning Our Lord presumably was a home-schooler and He is once basically taunted with it, probably at a time when schools were already prestigious, but not yet obligatory.
And the Jews wondered, saying: How doth this man know letters, having never learned
[John 7:15]
50:39 Tom, the French priest Jean Colson in 1968 published a thesis, named l'Énigme du disciple que Jésus aimait.
In it he states that John the Beloved had "worn the golden head band" so, he was not one of the twelve, a lesser rank of disciples, but potentially at least very high ranking as an OT priest.
Do you think the text of Josephus could help to figure out who of the Cohens St. John the Beloved was?
My hunch is Theophilus Ben Hanan, since "whom Jesus loved" according to very clear Johannine theology would be the same as "whom God loved" = "Theophilus" ...
51:44 Two questions.
1) Is Hanan ben Hanan the high priest John who's facing John of Zebedee in acts 4?
And Annas the high priest, and Caiphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest
[Acts Of Apostles 4:6]
2) Apart from the absurd shilly-shallying of first being a disciple and hosting the Mother of God, then being a persecutor and then going back to being a disciple, is there something that precludes that Hanan ben Hanan was John the Beloved?
That would be one explanation of why he didn't write Christian literature before the Jewish war.
No comments:
Post a Comment