‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never really existed on earth but was a mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus did exist, as a normal, non-divine, human being. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.
The first post in this book review is here. All subsequent posts will be linked at the end of that post as they go up.
In the previous post, I discussed the examples Price gives of teachings or approaches he believes Mark to have derived from Paul. In this one, I’ll discuss some of Price’s other statements in the chapter, followed by a general look at the story so far.
While we have seen that many of the scenes in the Gospel called Mark are based on literary allusions to the Hebrew scriptures, the Jesus character himself is based on Paul. It is clear from analysis of the Gospel called Mark that the writer of that story had read the letters of Paul and used them as inspiration for the character and teachings of Jesus.
My first thought when I read that was ‘Well, why not just write the allegory about Paul?’ According to Price’s theory, Mark was trying to write an entirely fictional account purely for allegorical purposes. If he wanted to fictionalise a person based on Paul’s life, seems like the obvious thing would be to write a fictional version of Paul, rather than of Jesus. Price has stated in a comment on here that it was to give Mark’s message the greater authority of coming from Jesus; but in that case, why portray Jesus as a flesh-and-blood person at all? According to Price’s theory, Mark and the audience for whom he was writing believed Jesus to be a spiritual heavenly being, who would surely have had more authority than an ordinary flesh-and-blood being; why this whole business of rewriting him as a human, rather than just portraying him as visiting Earth to make his announcements? I still can’t see how Mark’s motives, under Price’s theory, add up in a plausible or coherent way.
On further consideration, I realised there was a bigger problem; how would Mark have read this many of Paul’s letters in the first place? We’re used to having them collected handily together as part of the New Testament, but that wouldn’t happen until long after the time Mark wrote his gospel. At the time Mark was writing, the individual letters would have been in the possession of the widely scattered communities to which Paul had sent them. The passages that Price identifies as those on which Mark supposedly based parts of his gospel include extracts from letters originally sent to Rome, Corinth, Philippi, and Galatia. I’ve checked a map of Paul’s journeys to get an idea of how far apart these places actually were; my rough estimate is that a journey taking in all of them would be upwards of a thousand miles. In those days, that would have been a massive undertaking, complicated further by the difficulties of locating each community. It’s not impossible that someone could have made that mammoth journey in order to read each of Paul’s letters, but it does seem pretty unlikely. So, while I’m quite happy with the idea that Mark was influenced by Pauline teaching and by some of his writing, I don’t think Price’s argument about the extent to which Mark had supposedly read Paul’s writing really holds up.
By the way, I didn’t realise this until I’d already made notes on which of Price’s examples I did or didn’t agree with. When I did realise the problem with Price’s claim here, I thought I’d better go back and look at the four examples for which I agreed that Price was probably correct about Pauline derivation; after all, if it turned out that they were from letters sent to different communities then I’d have some contradictory conclusions and I’d have to rethink. What I actually found, however, was that all four examples were based on passages from 1 Corinthians. So, there we go; we do have evidence (hardly watertight, but fairly good) that, whoever Mark actually was, he read at least that letter, and thus was associated at some point with the Corinthians community. I’m guessing that probably at least someone in the field of biblical scholarship has noticed this before, but it was new information for me and I found it interesting.
Thus, if Mark’s Jesus is based on the writings of Paul, then Mark’s Jesus has no relationship to any real person whatsoever, because according to Paul himself, Paul’s “knowledge” of Jesus came from no one. [quote of Galatians 1:11 – 17]
That doesn’t logically follow. It’s perfectly possible that Mark could have used Paul as one of multiple sources for information, basing parts of his gospel on Paul’s letters and part on other sources. (In fact, this is what Price is also claiming happened, as he believes Mark also drew on the Jewish scriptures.) If Mark’s Jesus could be shown to be based entirely on Paul’s letters then that would be a different matter, but that isn’t what Price is trying to claim. Since Paul and his followers believed that Paul had also seen Jesus and received direct communication from him (they believed this had happened via supernatural apparition post-resurrection, but this was completely real from their viewpoint), I see no reason why Mark wouldn’t have drawn on information from both Paul and people who knew Jesus during his lifetime.
By the way, that Galatians passage always strikes me as a pretty ironic one for mythicists to quote. The mythical arguments that I’ve read (including Price’s) all put huge emphasis on Paul’s lack of interest in Jesus’s earthly life and his belief that Jesus was some kind of pre-existent heavenly being. But, since we know from Paul’s own words that he was not preaching the theology of the previously-existing group of Jesus-followers, why should his beliefs about whether or not Jesus led an earthly life be relevant evidence as to whether Jesus actually did lead an earthly life? Paul’s beliefs about Jesus seem to have been highly tangential to reality.
Most of the rest of the chapter is devoted to Price’s examples, so I’ll now skip ahead to the last paragraph of the chapter. Here, Price speculates on Mark’s motive for writing his gospel. Now, this is quite an important point for any mythicist theory, since mythicism has to explain how, within less than a century, we could plausibly get from ‘Jesus was a purely spiritual heavenly being’ to ‘Jesus was born on Earth; here are multiple detailed stories about his earthly life’. Here’s what Price gives us:
Paul’s message was one of harmony between Jews and Gentiles. This message was apparently in conflict with the message of James and other members of the Jesus cult, and with the Jewish leadership. I think the writer of Mark was a follower of Paul, who saw in the outcome of the war proof that Paul had been right. I think the writer’s view was, “See, if they had listened to Paul none of this would have happened”, or perhaps, “This was destined to happen, in accordance with Paul’s gospel.” It was the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of the temple that precipitated the need to defend Paul’s vision.
Now, Price might be able to make this work as a plausible theory, but he’s got some problems to overcome.
Firstly, it’s based on some unsubstantiated premises: that ‘harmony between Jews and Gentiles’ was a major message of Paul’s, that this was an issue on which he clashed significantly with the Jerusalem church, and that Mark’s gospel also clearly presents this point. Unfortunately, Price doesn’t make the case for any of these premises. (I have a niggling feeling that the problem might be Price having interpreted the initial disagreement over whether Gentiles joining the movement had to follow Jewish law as a ‘harmony’ issue. If so, then in the first place that’s not actually what ‘harmony’ means, and in the second it seems to be a moot point, since Paul was assuring his followers that that little disagreement had been sorted out in his favour.)
Secondly, there’s the question of why an author whose primary motive was defending Paul’s message against the church would fall short of giving us any kind of clearcut message on the one subject on which Paul certainly did have a significant, and as far as we know unresolved, clash with the church; the question of whether Jewish law had been rendered obsolete. While a discussion of Mark’s approach to this question would take too long to go into in detail here, he at no point shows Jesus making a clear statement on the issue (even though he could quite easily have put Paul’s views into Jesus’s mouth), and, in the many arguments Jesus is portrayed as having with Pharisees, Jesus is in fact in each case taking a position completely in line with established Jewish law. All this makes sense if Mark wanted to gloss over the differences between Paul’s views and the church’s, but is at least somewhat odd if his purpose was to tell the church how wrong they’d been to disagree with Paul; in that case it would seem more likely that the differences would be highlighted rather than glossed over, with gMark’s Jesus making clear statements on the matter.
All of these might well be surmountable problems; I don’t think they’re fundamental flaws in the theory, and there might well be good answers I haven’t thought of. However, this is an area of his theory that Price definitely needs to develop a bit further.
Conclusion: The theory so far
This completes the second chapter, which means we’ve also completed the part of the book that deals with Price’s views on the gospel of Mark. By this point, according to Price, we’re supposed to have been provided with ‘overwhelming concrete evidence that the Gospel of Mark is an entirely fictional work’, which in turn is the cornerstone for his whole theory. So, I’ll pause for just a moment here to take stock.
I agree with Price on some points (something that I think is worth mentioning here, because it gets rather lost in the disagreements). I agree with Price that there is a lot more going on in Mark’s writing than just some sort of simple record of what he’d heard about Jesus; I agree that multiple parts of his gospel allude to/are based on the Jewish scriptures; and I agree that his theology was in large part Pauline in nature and that this comes through in the way he presents Jesus’s story and teachings. I think that a convincing argument can be made for all of these points.
The problem I find with Price’s theories is that he takes these ideas much too far; he is, as the saying has it, making too much stew from one oyster. Firstly, his criteria for what he’ll categorise as an example of derivation from a scriptural or Pauline source are so vague that he’s categorising far too many scenes as being ‘clearly’ or ‘obviously’ due to derivation on Mark’s part, even where the arguments for this being the case are in fact extremely weak. Secondly, he’s concluding that, because Mark is using Jesus’s story as a symbolic way of getting his messages across, this must make the entire story fictional.
In fact, even if Price’s arguments about the extent of Mark’s derivation from other sources did stand up, it still wouldn’t follow that Mark had invented the earthly life of Jesus in its entirety. For one thing, there’s no logic to that claim; it is perfectly possible for an author to use a story based on a real person as a device for symbolically making a particular point (for example, ‘L’Alouette’, one of the plays I studied for French A-level, does exactly this with regard to Joan of Arc). And, for another thing, we actually see that Mark was prepared to do this with a historical character, because he does this with John the Baptist. He writes about him in ways that, as Price pointed out in Chapter 1, are fairly clearly symbolic (presenting him as an Elijah-figure), yet we know that John the Baptist existed, because there’s a long passage about him in Josephus’s work. So there’s not even a question over whether Mark would write about a real figure with a real earthly life in a symbolised way; we know he would, because he did. And so we can’t conclude that Mark’s use of Jesus’s story as a vehicle for symbolic messages means that Mark had no knowledge of an earthly Jesus.
It’s fair to say that gMark is too mythologised and slanted to give us particularly reliable information about the details of Jesus’s life, and also fair to say that, if we only had gMark and no other evidence, then we simply wouldn’t be able to tell whether Mark was writing about a real character or a fictional one. But Price has unfortunately fallen far short of his claim to have given us ‘overwhelming concrete evidence’ that the book is entirely fictional.
Interesting review. Thanks.
We should not be too sure about that. Neil Godfrey just wrote: John the Baptist: Another Case for Forgery in Josephus
While we shouldn’t be too sure about anything this minor and that far back, we should also keep in mind Godfrey’s penchant for promoting work of lesser quality as worthy of serious consideration.
@#2, One Brow:
Dr. Rivka Nir’s reputation does not look too shabby:
https://www.openu.ac.il/en/personalsites/RivkaNir.aspx
Do you have any concrete criticism on point regarding her book, ‘The First Christian Believer’?
@Jörg, #1: I’ll look out for Neil’s upcoming post explaining Nir’s belief. It is, however, going to have to explain a) why a Christian would have gone to such lengths to insert a long passage about a secondary gospel figure into someone’s work, and b) how, if Origen was not in fact referring to that passage but to one he’d misremembered as being from Hegesippus, he just happened to misremember it as being in that specific volume.
Joerg,
Many people of excellent reputation nonetheless find themselves committed to highly questionable ideas.
Dr Sarah @#4:
ad a) a secondary gospel figure: All 4 evangelists saw John the Baptist as essential to their gospels, e.g. for introducing Jesus. Ask any priest.
ad b) misremembered as being from Hegesippus: Yes, that is weird.
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Btw., I just discovered this older article with some powerful arguments from Frank Zindler: 5 reasons to suspect John the Baptist was interpolated into Josephus
@Jörg, #6:
Yup. So… why would someone see it as essential that a historian mention JtB? So essential that they spend time crafting and writing out a long, detailed interpolation, carefully mimicking Josephus’s style to make it indistinguishable from his work? Why would they go to all this trouble only to deviate from the gospel account on key details? And why, if they were going to all this trouble to include a section about John, would they make no mention whatsoever of Jesus, who is, after all, generally considered even more essential to the gospels?
If Nir has a good explanation for these things, more power to her. I’ll wait and see what Godfrey has to say about her theory. But, if it doesn’t explain the above (plus the ‘eighteenth book’ thing), then I don’t really think it’s going to stand up.
‘1. The Baptist material intrudes into its context quite roughly.’
Do you think it does? I mean, I guess it’s a matter of opinion, but the context is Herod’s battle with Aretas, so a comment that some of the Jews thought Herod’s loss to Aretas was a punishment and an explanation of the backstory of this always reads as perfectly in context to me. I don’t see it as rough or an intrusion at all.
‘2. The passage about John the Baptist says Herod sent John to the castle of Macherus to be killed. Yet only two sentences before the Paragraph [1] summarized above, Josephus had written that the castle of Macherus did not belong to Herod, but to the king who soon afterwards attacked him.’
There’s a discussion of this at http://peterkirby.com/a-conjectural-corruption-of-josephus.html, looking at the likelihood of Josephus’s original statement having been slightly misttranscribed or mistranslated and how that would affect the meaning. It’s a while since I’ve read that post, but it struck me as seeming perfectly feasible when I read it. Let me know if you disagree.
‘3. In the John the Baptist paragraph the author writes that the reason Herod’s army was defeated by Aretas was that God was punishing him for his unjust treatment of John.’
Firstly; no he doesn’t. He writes that ‘some of the Jews’ thought this. Secondly, the line Godfrey references as supposedly being an example of Josephus blaming Herod’s defeat on something different actually isn’t about Herod’s defeat; it’s about Caius banishing Herod and giving his estates to Agrippa.
(By the way, even if Josephus had blamed Herod’s defeat on both those different factors at different times, that would hardly be an irreconcilable contradiction. One might as well argue that if a fundie preacher attributes some disaster to God’s punishment for legalising gay marriage, and at another time attributes it to God’s punishment for the banning of prayer in schools, then one of those statements must be a forgery as one person could never have held both opinions.)
‘4. Josephus makes no mention of John the Baptist when discussing Herod in his other book, The Wars of the Jews.‘
I am truly not sure what the point is supposed to be here. Is Zindler trying to say that Josephus wouldn’t have mentioned this in one book unless he was also going to bring it up whenever he mentioned the subject of Herod elsewhere? Since when is it impossible for someone to bring up a relevant story on one occasion of writing about an issue and not on a different occasion of writing about the same issue?
‘5. John the Baptist is not mentioned in the early Greek table of contents to the Antiquities of Josephus, but he is found in the later Latin version.’
Was the later Latin version by any chance written at a time when Christianity had become mainstream enough that highlighting a mention of a character known to people for religious reasons was important to the person drawing up the chapter headings in a way that wouldn’t have been the case at the time Josephus wrote the original?
Dr Sarah:
Eusebius was not a historian. He was a Christian apologist historian, who somewhere else – I might find the source later – wrote explicitly that he did not mind forging some facts if it helped with the the Jesus PR. The details of his JtB interpolation into Antiquities nicely complement the gospels to make it more convincing to the reader. I guess his style evolved from his cruder interpolation for Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum, in chapter 3.
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I have reread ch. 5 and think it does not fit. But Josephus might just have had a headache that day and might not have been properly focused when writing it. 😉
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Thanks!
@Jörg, #8:
In case it wasn’t clear, by ‘historian’ I was referring to Josephus. Why would a forger see it as essential that Josephus have this lengthy detailed description of John the Baptist?
Indeed, and ‘Jesus PR’ does very well explain why a forger would want to put in lines like ‘He was the Messiah’, or ‘On the third day he appeared to them restored to life’. It’s easy to see why a forger would have wanted to add those lines. Why would a forger have wanted to add a detailed story about John the Baptist that contributed nothing to Christian belief?
Eusebius has a chapter on JtB in his Church History, and in it, he refers to Josephus to make his case more credible. Josephus was THE historian at the time. E.g. in the century before, Origen still complained about the lack of information about Jesus in the Antiquities.
@Jörg, #10:
Interesting bit of information: I just went back to Origen to check what you said about him complaining about the lack of information (as I thought, he was complaining not so much about lack of information as about the fact that Josephus didn’t attribute the Jewish defeat in the war to their rejection of Jesus and Origen thought he should have said this, but that’s by-the-by), and noticed this line from the beginning of Chapter 47 in Book 1 that I hadn’t noticed before:
‘I would like to say to Celsus, who represents the Jew as accepting somehow John as a Baptist…’
According to the Britannica site, Celsus wrote his work around 178 CE. So that means that, at that time, Celsus had reason to think that the Jews knew of John the Baptist. It’s fourth-hand evidence, but it is the kind of thing that would be very unlikely to show up if JtB was an entirely fictional character. So, that’s one more piece of evidence for JtB’s existence.
Anyway, going back to the discussion of whether it could have been Eusebius: I agree that Eusebius was happy enough to cite the Josephan mention in support of his argument. And it’s possible that he might have considered it enough of a reason to insert an interpolation mentioning JtB (bear in mind that this would be no small endeavour; inserting an interpolation into a book in those days would have required copying a huge amount by hand to put the interpolation in smoothly). But… would he have gone to the trouble of carefully composing a lengthy interpolation copying Josephus’s style, only to make it contradict the gospel accounts in important details when supposedly his motive was to back up the claim to historicity of the gospel accounts? That’s a pretty unlikely chain of events, compared to the idea that the passage is genuine.
@#11: Thanks for the info on Origen.
#11:
The point is moot as Eusebius or his scribes made a copy or copies of the Antiquities anyway. Isn’t that the one got their own copy at his time? There were no printing presses, no National Libraries, and no copyright attorneys. His version became authoritative in its descendants.
Sorry, mouse accident lead to premature comment posting.
#11:
The point is moot as Eusebius or his scribes made a copy or copies of the Antiquities anyway. Isn’t that the way one got their own copy at his time? There were no printing presses, no National Libraries, and no copyright attorneys. Subsequently, his version became authoritative in its descendants.
Jörg.
The point is moot as Eusebius or his scribes made a copy or copies of the Antiquities anyway. Isn’t that the way one got their own copy at his time? There were no printing presses, no National Libraries, and no copyright attorneys. Subsequently, his version became authoritative in its descendants.
Became, but was not originally. There would have been several contemporaneous copies of Josephus, and trying to quote extensively from a forged passage would have been noticed. Inserting select comments into a passage is one thing, creating an entire passage from nothing is something quite different.
Godfrey published his next post on Dr. Nir’s work. It is exactly what I expected: carefully selected material that supports one side of the argument, no references to material that argued against these positions, an elevation of a minority position to a controversy, and a pretense at presenting a balanced approach.
https://vridar.org/2021/03/09/early-thoughts-on-authenticity-of-john-the-baptist-passage-in-josephus/
@#16 One Brow: Thanks for reminding me. I had skipped over that posting.
@Jörg, #8 (reprise)
Huh; turns out this isn’t true. Apparently Gibbon interpreted a fairly innocuous comment of Eusebius’s in the worst possible light, and people just accepted that and ran with it without question, to the point where it’s now frequently cited as fact. A useful reminder both of the importance of not accepting points unquestioningly and of how easy it is for someone with an agenda to misinterpret things.
#14:
Yeah, I hate it when that happens. 🙂
I strongly suspect it would have been the latter, as copying volumes of existing writing by hand was the kind of lower-level work that I would think would be done by underlings rather than by the people in charge. This was what scribes were for. So, although I could be wrong, I think the forger of the TF was likely to have been a scribe rather than someone on Eusebius’s level anyway. (Interesting question; must remember to ask Tim O’Neill, who knows a lot more history than I do.)
However, to get back to the JtB passage: Yes, there were times when people were hand-copying the books and had the opportunity to insert passages. But the JtB passage is both notably longer and much more typical of Josephus’s style than the TF. Why would a Christian go to so much more trouble to forge a passage about a secondary character than to forge a passage about Jesus himself?
@Jörg #17—12 March 2021—says: “I had skipped over that posting.”
Jörg if you missed the following, they may also be of interest.
• Godfrey, Neil (27 August 2020). “continuing … Biblical Narratives, Archaeology, Historicity – Essays in Honour of Thomas L. Thompson”. Vridar.
• Godfrey, Neil (10 December 2020). “Another Pointer Towards a Late Date for the Gospel of Mark?”. Vridar.
@#19 db: Thanks!
@Jörg, FYI.
• McAdon, Brad (2017). “Josephus and Mark”. Alpha: Studies in Early Christianity. 1: 92–93. “The author of our canonical Mark may have been influenced by several texts . . . Josephus’s Antiquities Book 18, and the Septuagint. If so, there will be significant implications concerning the historicity of Mark’s John the Baptist narratives, the dating of canonical Mark, and Mark’s compositional practices.”
Brad McAdon notes the similarities between the Markan text and Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews.
• Comment by Brad McAdon—13 December 2020—per Godfrey, Neil. “Another Pointer Towards a Late Date for the Gospel of Mark?”. Vridar. 10 December 2020:
@Jörg #8—6 March 2021—says: “Eusebius was not a historian. He was a Christian apologist historian, who somewhere else – I might find the source later – wrote explicitly that he did not mind forging some facts if it helped with the the Jesus PR.”
• Edward Gibbon (1891) [between 1776 and 1789]. History of Christianity: Comprising All that Relates to the Progress of the Christian Religion in “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,”…. P. Eckler. p. 286. “Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion.”
Cf. Pearse (2001–2010). “Eusebius the Liar?”. Roger Pearse’s Pages. As to why Gibbon errs.
However it still stands that as a known propagandist and a liar, Eusebius can not be trusted Prima facie.
• Carrier (20 November 2020). “How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity”. Richard Carrier Blogs. [NOW BOLDED]
@ db : Fair points on Eusebius but not sure that Carrier is a guy I’d really trust or want to be citing on FTB of all places especially :
https://skepchick.org/2019/05/prominent-atheist-sues-everyone-shares-intimate-details-of-sex-life-with-court-of-law/
&
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/11/25/we-win/
&
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier
@StevoR, #23
ROFL, Carrier said it best himself:
• “Is American atheism heading for a schism? | Peter McGrath”. the Guardian. 2 September 2012.
@db, #19: Doesn’t look as though Neil’s ever gone into more detail about the JtB/Hyrcanus theory, so it’s hard to tell whether that stands up or not. (Speaking of which, he also never seems to have finished writing about Nir’s interpolation theory, so I’m still none the wiser as to whether she suggests any sort of plausible motive for why anyone would go to the trouble of inserting a detailed passage about JtB in Josephus’s style.)
As for the idea that Mark drew on Josephus for his information; well, verses like Matthew 24:34 and similar do seem to make it unlikely that the Synoptics were written as late as post-Josephan, since they certainly seem to have been written at a time when people still found it valid to expect the end times to come within the lifetimes of the people who’d been around for Jesus. But I haven’t read the article, so perhaps a plausible explanation is given for that. However, from the point of view of the context in which I mentioned JtB above, it actually doesn’t make a difference. The point I was trying to make is that, as Mark described JtB in symbolic terms, we know that he was willing to use such a description for a figure he believed to have had an earthly existence, and so we cannot use the fact that he described Jesus in symbolic terms to deduce that he invented the idea of Jesus having had an earthly existence.
@db, #21: Wait a minute. This commenter’s case for Mark having drawn on Josephus is that they have a lot of similarities in their description of the same events? Please tell me I’m not the only person who sees the gaping logic flaw in that argument.
What exactly does this guy think an account of JtB drawn from another source would look like, by comparison? Did he believe all non-Josephan information available about JtB would have all points completely wrong?
@db, #22: I note that you’ve repeated the misleading Gibbon quote about Eusebius despite knowing it’s been debunked. I also find a certain pot/kettle irony in the source of the other quote you’ve found about not trusting someone who’s a known propagandist, though let us go no further into that given the person’s propensity for expensive lawsuits.
Setting all that aside: Yes, I’m sure Eusebius had an agenda in what he wrote, and I have no trouble believing that he would have interpreted what he read and heard through the lens of his own belief and that that would have affected the accuracy of his reporting. But that’s really not on the same level as deliberately and cold-bloodedly setting out to forge a lengthy passage so carefully that it’s indistinguishable from the work of the author who supposedly wrote it. So, no, the fact that Eusebius had an agenda does not mean that we can fairly accuse him of forgery.
@StevoR, #23: Ah, thanks for that; always good to have a reminder of just how superb Rebecca Watson’s takedown was. 🙂
@Dr Sarah, #27 says: “[T]he fact that Eusebius had an agenda does not mean that we can fairly accuse him of forgery.”
My position is that Eusebius can not be trusted prima facie.
• Allen, N.P.L. (2015) Clarifying the Scope of Pre-Fifth-Century C.E. Christian Interpolation in Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae (c. 94 C.E.). Unpublished Philosophiae Doctor thesis, Potchefstroom: North-West University:
Cf. HATA, Gohei. 2007. The Abuse and Misuse of Josephus in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, Books 2 and 3, in Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism: Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume, Eds. Shaye J.D. Cohen and Joshua J.Schwartz, Leiden: E.J. Brill and Co.
@db, comment #29:
A reminder at this point, before we stray too far, that that’s irrelevant to the topic we were discussing; the discussion was about whether John the Baptist existed and whether the passage about him in Josephus can be taken as reasonably good evidence of this. The only reason Eusebius came into the discussion at all was because Jörg had a theory he could have interpolated the JtB passage, but this is currently not standing up due to a) the complete lack of a plausible motive and b) Origen’s reference to a JtB passage in that particular book of Josephus. Neither of those flaws relates to Eusebius’s trustworthiness, so whether or not he can be trusted is irrelevant to the debate here.
I don’t think Eusebius can be trusted either, though I mean it in the sense of ‘his writings would have to be interpreted carefully in view of his agenda’ rather than in the sense of believing he’d deliberately forge something, which is a whole other question. I don’t think anyone here is trying to argue for Eusebius’s trustworthiness, but it’s off-topic enough and we’ve had enough off-topic arguments taking over the Jesus mythicism threads that I would on the whole prefer to head this particular discussion off at the pass.
@Dr Sarah, #30 says: “[T]he discussion was about whether John the Baptist existed…”
1) Which raises the question: What source(s), if any, did the Markan author use to derive the “Markan John the Baptist [mJtB]” figure?
2) Which in turn raises the question: What year was the Markan text composed?
The source(s) available to the Markan author are multiplied by the assertion of Theodore Weeden that the Markan text could not have been written before the early 80s ce. Cf. Weeden, Theodore J. (2003). “Two Jesuses, Jesus of Jerusalem and Jesus of Nazareth: Provocative Parallels and Imaginative Imitation”. Forum NS (Westar Institute: Polebridge Press) 6 (2): 137–341. ISSN 0883-4970.
Continuing Rivka Nir’s case for the John the Baptist passage in Josephus being a Christian interpolation.
• Godfrey, Neil (29 March 2021). “John the Baptist’s Place in Josephus’s Antiquities”. Vridar.
@Dr Sarah, #25 says: “[V]erses like Matthew 24:34 and similar do seem to make it unlikely that the Synoptics were written as late as post-Josephan…”
Steve Mason makes a strong argument for Luke being post-Josephan.
• Mason, Steve. “Josephus and Luke-Acts”. Josephus and the New Testament. Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers. pp. 185–229. ISBN 978-0-943575-99-5.
• Allen, N. (2019). Josephus and Luke-Acts: A critical review of a thesis by Steve Mason. (Available Online)