Posted by araucaria
(here)
Posted by marlowe
(here)
Joseph Atwill proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt
Marlowe, my friend, he does no such thing. You are taking his word as… gospel, just as he is taking Josephus as gospel. Let me be the unbeliever here
and pick a few holes in this story of yours.
First, let’s suppose for a moment that Josephus wrote Matthew’s gospel. Did he write Mark, which textual analysis shows came first and served as source material for the other three? He did not. Did he write Luke and John, and the Acts of the Apostles? No he didn’t. No one is claiming otherwise. Did he write the gospels of Philip, Thomas, Peter, Mary, and many others later discarded? Of course he didn’t. So many witnesses all with roughly the same story would sound impressive in a court of law.
Then perhaps Josephus didn’t write Matthew after all. Perhaps it was the other way round and he based his history of the Judaea campaign on the gospel account. We are talking after all of the Romans and their self-promotion of their ‘evil’ policies: perhaps they were even more devious about it than you are supposing. In other words, I am suggesting that the historian was writing fiction. He wouldn’t be the first.
Take Winston Churchill, who wrote his own history of World War II. Beautifully written, but historians have been picking holes in it ever since. It is a top down version by just one participant, albeit a very important one. But historians like to take into account as many eye-witness accounts as possible. These are only just drying up 70 years on.
Where did Churchill get the time? He was voted out of office as early as 1945, mostly by returning war vets who from experience weren’t buying into the war hero nonsense. In other words, Churchill’s history was denounced by millions as fiction before he ever put pen to paper. Of course he had to give a factual account of the war that everyone knew about, but he put a slant on it that did not correspond to the grassroots reality of the individuals involved in the war.
Now imagine this history being written by a German traitor, someone like the duke of Windsor… And imagine him having a monopoly on the story, no one to contradict him. Josephus was a Jewish defector who gained acceptance among the Flavians, and is the only source we have for Titus’s campaign. The manner of his defection as one of two survivors of a suicide pact arranged by himself is highly suspicious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem
With no one to check on him, the details of the campaign could have been entirely made up by Josephus: they did not need to have happened at all. He could have taken them from the life of Jesus, which is corroborated by many more than Josephus’s story. He might have done this out of pure laziness, or out of familiarity with the ‘typology’ principle whereby stories are based on other stories. Or he might have done it with the ulterior motive ascribed to him by Joseph Atwill, although doing the opposite to what Atwill claims. According to Josephus, the sack of Jerusalem led to 1,100,000 killed and 97,000 taken prisoner. That's quite a few people who would not be needing to turn the other cheek.
By the way, this ‘typology’ method is by no means restricted to biblical story-telling. E.H. Gombrich’s
Art & Illusion describes how art has always copied art – for example, if you had never seen a whale or rhinoceros, you would just copy someone else’s woodcut or drawing. And plagiarism was rife among writers long before cutting-and-pasting made life easier for cheats and Internet searches made it harder for them.
Moreover, the ‘typology’ principle also applies to historical events. Wikipedia disambiguation lists 17 sieges of Jerusalem, and the fire that destroyed the Temple in 70 somewhat reiterates the fire of Rome probably started by Nero a couple of years earlier. Also military tactics are decided by adapting what has worked in previous battles to the present situation.
Finally, here is a character assessment of Josephus that suggests that this character should be deeply mistrusted – but why should we have any faith anyway in someone whose whole purpose as claimed by Atwill is disinformation?
Josephus's life story remains ambiguous. He was described by Harris in 1985 as a law-observant Jew who believed in the compatibility of Judaism and Graeco-Roman thought, commonly referred to as Hellenistic Judaism.[3] Before the nineteenth century, the scholar Nitsa Ben-Ari notes that his work was shunned like that of converts, then banned as those of a traitor, whose work was not to be studied or translated into Hebrew.[16] His critics were never satisfied as to why he failed to commit suicide in Galilee and, after his capture, accepted the patronage of Romans.
The historian E. Mary Smallwood wrote:
"[Josephus] was conceited, not only about his own learning but also about the opinions held of him as commander both by the Galileans and by the Romans; he was guilty of shocking duplicity at Jotapata, saving himself by sacrifice of his companions; he was too naive to see how he stood condemned out of his own mouth for his conduct, and yet no words were too harsh when he was blackening his opponents; and after landing, however involuntarily, in the Roman camp, he turned his captivity to his own advantage, and benefitted for the rest of his days from his change of side"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavius_Josephus
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