It's been a while since we had a young Earth creationist thread on WF

Oh, absolutely, but that concerns the idea that the Pentateuch comes from one author and that that author is Moses. That is a very late myth and clearly factually false. It doesn't mean that Moses, an Egyptian priest who went with the Israelites when they left Egypt, didn't exist, though, and Doane seems to be quite convinced that that Moses was real.

I haven't met a scholar who doesn't. They're not drastically different; they just contain two terms that Josephus doesn't usually employ, namely 'Christ' and 'Messiah'. But it is quite imaginable that he would use these terms to mark the exoticism and cultural specificity of what he is talking about. But even those who believe the passages are inauthentic usually only suspect that some later commentator added those two words, not that the passages about Jesus as a whole are fabricated.

Arguably so, but that's a a tiny fraction of his histories, and one in which he has motive to twist things a little. Every source has a history and a context; you will find none that is above reproach, and you can't prove any event through witnesses beyond any possible doubt. But we do find the kind of sources reporting on Jesus' life and crucifixion that we would expect if it happened.

Was it the novel Light of Other Days?

Phenomenal novel.

My favorite alternate Jesus novel is Moorcock's "Behold the Man."

That’s a good one, but no. I may actually be thinking of something from the History Channel, tho . . .

Somebody is misreading something somewhere, because Doane quite clearly points out where the tales of Moses borrow from various mythologies. The implication being that if there was a person named "Moses" whatever we know about him is so far detached from reality that it's essentially useless for telling us anything meaningful about him. We also know from the historical records that nothing as described about Moses could have happened in ancient Egypt, for we now have the records from that period and conclusive establish that there were no Jewish slaves in Egypt. When Doane was writing the Rosetta Stone had been translated only some years before and archaeologists were just starting to poke around in Egypt. We've essentially found the accounting ledgers and the like during the periods in which the Jews were thought to be enslaved, and not only can we say that this wasn't the case, but not only were the people who built the things attributed to Jewish slaves well compensated, but they were also given things like free medical care and housing while the projects were going on.

Yes, but that is not a contradiction.

In chapter VI, Doane points out the several different historical sources that agree in saying that an Egyptian priest by the name of Moses went with the Israelites when they left Egypt. At the same time, it is also true that mythical stories such as the one about a baby being found and raised by a Princess or the delivery of laws on the top a hill were then associated with that person.

Ok, that is a direct contradiction to what I have just read in Chapter VI, where Doane clearly talks about an exodus from Egypt accompanied by a priest named Moses, albeit one in which people are driven out of Egypt due to being associated with a plague rather than let go on their own accord because they want to escape slavery. Will you take a look at Chapter VI and explain what you mean?

Now I'm confused. If they never existed, what does it mean to say that they were well compensated and received healthcare?

Perhaps it changes in translation, but it damned sure wasn't the use of two unusual words in Josephus that got my attention. It was the fact that seemingly out of nowhere he starts talking about such things. It made no sense for it to be in that part of the text. And scholars familiar with the original languages used in the texts, regardless of where they fall on the issue of Jesus, all seem to consider those passages highly suspect to say the least.

Fruit of the poisoned tree, and all that. If you can't trust Josephus on how he was one of the only members of the military to survive an attack by the Romans, you probably can't trust other things that he put down.

As for the contemporary sources (or near contemporary) which are supposed to be the very kinds one would expect to have a discussion about Jesus, according to those folks I've read who believe that there was an actual Jesus, there's nothing there. I have heard the claim that there are certain Roman emperors we know less about than we do about Jesus (as has been claimed by many), and when I've asked who those emperors were, the response I've gotten is that "Oh, well, the Romans were actually very good record keepers and we know a great deal about every person who claimed the title of Roman emperor." Do you see the problem here?

And if you start poking around in things like the linguistic rules for when a semi-literate society like Israel at that point in time would have committed significant events to paper, the math is waaaaay off for when Jesus was supposed to have lived. It makes more sense for him to have lived a few decades earlier than is commonly believed. If he lived at all.

Dr. Robert Price does a podcast called The Bible Geek and he quite frequently lays out a compelling case for why Jesus is almost certainly an entirely mythical figure.

It is a strong indication that said person never existed. If tell you about my friend Peter and talk about how he could climb walls and shoot spider-web like goo from his wrists are you going to think that he was a real person? Even if I can point you to a number of "documentaries" dating back to the 1970s which clearly show such a thing happening? Or, are you going to assume I'm talking out of my ass, no matter what?

It means that the folks who built the pyramids and other such things were Egyptians, not Jews. I don't know how to make it any plainer than that. Yeah, I know, that's far from an ideal link, but even Wikipedia admits that the idea of Jews being enslaved by Egypt is bullshit.

That is not what I found. Most scholars seem to think the passages are fine. Some do have doubts, but those doubts mostly concern individual terms which they believe might have been added later.

I disagree. He's unreliable when the evaluation -- not so much the facts -- of his own actions are concerned. But where he assembles accepted historical knowledge of his time, he's usually believed. The parts where we doubt his autobiographical claims are doubted because they are internally and externally inconsistent; but for the story of Jesus, there is no internal inconsistency in Josephus and the whole point of the exercise is that he corroborates several other external sources that agree with his account!

Sure there is. More than thirty different documents. Just because someone already tried to collect many of them in one place long before us and called them the New Testament doesn't make them just one source.

I don't actually see the problem (you can know a lot less about a person than we know about Jesus and still know quite a lot about them), but since that isn't an argument I've made or even heard, I think we can let it rest.

Where is this math? I'd love to check it.

Actually, if fifteen other sources corroborate the identity of a person called Peter Parker and living in said address and going to said school, sans the web-shooting and wall-climbing, I am going to conclude that the person does exist, only he isn't actually a superhero. Doane seems to come to a similar conclusion about the Egyptian priest that went with the Israelites.

Of course the people later called the Israelites were Egyptians at the time. Even the Bible agrees with that, referring to them as a nation only after the exodus, not during their time in Egypt and not in the tales about a few tribes before they moved to Egypt. But either way, that doesn't stop them from being Jews, because the categories of Jewish and Egyptian are not mutually exclusive. In any case, this does not mean that there never was an Egyptian priest named Moses who went with a largish group of Egyptian workers when they left Egypt.

Okay, time for you to start naming scholars. And, again, it's not one or two words which throw me off, it's where the whole thing appears in the work. It would be akin to watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and suddenly someone dropped in clips from the movie "Tron."

What accounts would those be? Here's one that claims it's a fraud. Here's another. Another. And another.

Great. Get back to me on the dating of that stuff. Note that the earliest stuff we think that was written down were some of the Pauline epistles, which is akin to saying that because the PT takes place before OT, there's no way that The Phantom Menace could have been filmed after A New Hope.

Except, of course, for the fact that one can make the claim that since a Spider-Man comic makes reference to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then Spider-Man must also be a real person. These people (and there are a number of them) make the claim that we know more about Jesus than we do certain Roman emperors. When asked who those Roman emperors might be they have know answer. Do you understand? They can't even offer so much as a name, and instead say that the Romans actually kept detailed records of who claimed to be emperor. Bart Ehrman is such a person to make that kind of claim, but good luck in getting him to name said emperors or how he came to that conclusion.

That'll take a lot of digging. It involves piecing together bits and pieces of things related to linguistics and the expansion of literacy in a society. Experts are able to date all kinds of things about a text based on hte kinds of words that are used. For example, they can tell a considerable amount about when a story was composed simply depending upon the use of the word "blue." The most primitive societies out there, don't have a word for it. While more advanced societies have multiple ones.

Save for the fact that you and I know that things like "fan-fic" exist, so we also know that the odds of there being a person named Peter Parker existed who in some manner inspired Stan Lee to name a comic book character after him are pretty low. We also know that any person named Peter Parker who could credibly prove that they were the inspiration for the character of Spider-Man would be able to sue Marvel/Disney for zillions of dollars and get them.

Right, the discovery of the Rosetta stone and the publication of Doane's book was closer in time than the opening of King Tut's tomb and the conversation we're having now. Who do you think is better able to fit King Tut in the history of Egypt? You or I? Or somebody writing 50 years ago?

No, Dayton. The Jews were not slaves in Egypt, even if they were, the time period assigned for Exodus means that their final destination was still part of the Egyptian empire at that time, So why flee? None of it makes any sense, so the only rational thing to do is toss the whole concept out the window. I mean, for fuck's sakes, man, you can walk from Egypt to Israel in a couple of days. There's no need o wander around for years trying to get from one place to the other.

I can if you like, but that will take more time. However, even a quick look at Wikipedia provides several names.

No, that way lies confusion. There are two very different claims against the Josephus documents: One, they are fabrications, and Josephus never wrote those passages. Two, Josephus cannot be trusted.

Obviously, if the first is true, then the latter is irrelevant as far as these passages are concerned. The sources you give here claim that Josephus didn't write those passages. For instance, this first source specifically says that if one of these passages had been in the Josephus text as known to Origen in the 3rd century, Origen would have cited it, concluding that it must have been added in an edition later than any that Origen used. That is not a claim against Josephus' character or his reliability.

However, if the first objection is false, then the second objection still only carries weight against the theology, not the history of Jesus. The passages in question align with the stories of the New Testament. Clearly, the author of the passage must have known those stories. Whether he believed them, or whether he is trustworthy, is irrelevant as long as we are discussing whether there is an absence of historical Roman sources acknowledging the story. If the Josephus passage is from Josephus -- no matter whether he was a liar or not -- then the story was known to scholars such as Josephus.

And that distinction between history and theology actually sets aside the whole argument surrounding Origen. Origen does know that Josephus discusses Jesus, and points out that he does; your own source says so! But Origen believes that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was God. I agree: I also think that Josephus knew of Jesus, but did not believe him to be God. So Josephus is not a source to prove that Jesus was God. But he is a source that shows that the historical fact of the person's existence was known to Josephus, and that Origen knew that it was known to Josephus.

I agree that the Pauline epistles are probably the oldest texts in the NT, and that the gospels are younger and mostly written after the events. What I don't see is why that disproves the existence of Jesus or of older sources. Dating the Phantom Menace to the year of its production does not prove that Star Wars didn't come out in the 1970s.

Again, this is not at all my argument, but if you tax me to name Roman Emperors about whom we have less information than about Jesus, that's pretty easy: Almost all of the Flavians, Nerva, Antonius Pius, and Commodus and his two successors (each of these last three might in fact not have existed!).

Yes. You're now in my own field of work, though I am not an expert for antiquity. I have yet to see any reliable scholar try to use an entropic argument to disprove a claim otherwise corroborated. Such calculations are extremely speculative; their use is in heuristics, as in "These numbers say there might be something here; let's start looking." They're not used to say, "There is something here, but the numbers didn't point to these texts, so let's throw them out!" They certainly are used for dating, but it's a huge misunderstanding to think that if a text contains a word that is younger than X then the text as a whole has to be younger. That is not how the tradition of texts of this age works. They were constantly changed and adapted when people copied them. We have not a single document from Plato or Aristotle as written by either of them; that is a fact, but it is very different from claiming that neither of these men ever lived.

Yes, but we also know how to distinguish them from social security records and highschool enrollment lists.

According to Doane, because they were suspected of carrying a disease and thus driven out of their original habitat, moving to another part of the Empire instead.

So let me get this straight. Are you now saying that Doane is wrong about Moses? I have no problem with that; I am discussing her book only because it is the source you pointed me to to explain your position.

As for the Jews in Egypt: They probably didn't call themselves a nation before they resettled in 'Israel', but the Semitic language as a minority language in Egypt is well established for the timeframe we're talking about. There was, among many other ethnic groups who were probably all considered to be Egyptian, one who spoke an early form of what we now call Hebrew; and a larger group of people who spoke a version of that language later settled in what they would eventually call Judea and Israel.