I’ve already documented that the amateur rage blogger Tim O’Neill is a hack and a liar in the Gullibility of Bart Ehrman & the Asscrankery of Tim O’Neill. How he responded to being caught lying and screwing up basic facts of history illustrates why he is an asscrank, a total tinfoil hatter, filled with slanderous rage and void of any competence and honesty. So for those who want to see more evidence of that fact, here you go. And in my conclusion, I will give instructions on how to deal with O’Neill’s crankery heretofore.
How to Detect a Crank
Cranks tend to be obsessively wordy whiners who obsess over insults and personal honor, and thus respond to being challenged with elaborate slanders. When you catch them lying and screwing up, they build massive word walls devoid of relevance expressing only rage and anger and ad hominem speculation and excuses, consisting only of libelous insults, before or even in lieu of addressing any substantive facts of the matter. Which exactly describes his response article: O’Neill opens it with over 2000 words of childish whining and slander. Nothing substantively relevant, all ad hominem, hardly anything accurate or even true. He rage blogs, rather than reasons or attends to evidence or truth.
Another sign of a crank is being a total amateur who can’t get anything published under peer review, and instead mocking any opponents who have prestigious credentials and publication histories. O’Neill likes to hide or disparage the fact that I have a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University (a prestigious Ivy League school) and numerous peer reviewed academic publications, including two books and several journal articles on this very subject. Tim O’Neill has no relevant credentials, no relevant graduate degrees, and no peer reviewed publications in history—at all, much less on the subjects I write.
Cranks are also often liars (or delusionally insane). O’Neill’s account of how once years ago he tried to make it seem as if I had misspelled several words, is not true. He weaves a false tale instead, about it being someone “else” who did that. But the evidence has long since been lost, so I can no longer demonstrate it. Just be aware: he is making up a story. As he tends to do. That he is not an honest man I demonstrated in the article he is responding to here, in which I show how he lies to his readers (and to Bart Ehrman) about what is and isn’t argued in my peer reviewed article that he was then responding to. He continues his lying here.
Relevant Facts v. Lies
Once we get past the miles of whining and slander, we finally get to something vaguely like a relevant response.
My original criticism was this:
I wrote that in 2013 Tim O’Neill “told [Bart] Ehrman that my paper” on the James reference in Josephus, that the prestigious peer reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies published, “was ‘riddled with problems’, yet never discusses any of my paper’s actual arguments, or any of my paper’s actual evidence, and instead spews his own lies and mistakes.” I then proceeded to demonstrate that fact. I also note that Ehrman gullibly thought everything O’Neill told him was correct. Thus demonstrating Ehrman never read my paper nor caught O’Neill’s mistakes, which means even Ehrman doesn’t know what he’s talking about, nor bothers to. He just gullibly believes any falsehood told him that fits what he wants to be true. That’s the very worst way to behave as a historian. It discredits your opinion as unreliable.
What does O’Neill have to say in response? Nothing. Except admissions of guilt, followed by evasion, and more lies.
The First Case
First, O’Neill admits that the central mistake in his claim to Ehrman was indeed wrong. He admits he confused which Ananus Josephus was referring to, demonstrating O’Neill read none of the scholarship on this passage, didn’t correct Ehrman on it, and isn’t an observant reader nor well acquainted with Josephus, and just makes shit up from the armchair before checking his facts first. To which defects O’Neill makes no response. He also thereby demonstrated Ehrman doesn’t do any of these things, or know anything about the facts here, either. O’Neill offers no defense for Ehrman.
As I concluded originally:
So O’Neill was simply careless here. He can’t establish the same Ananus is the guy who courted the aggrieved Jesus. Nor can he establish anything would actually have been odd about privately paying restitution for an inter-family murder. Nor can he even establish that the brothers James and Jesus even liked each other.
O’Neill makes no defense against these conclusions. At all. My conclusion is therefore correct. O’Neill’s amateurism and Ehrman’s gullibility stand as demonstrated.
The Second Case
Then O’Neill moves to my second point, where he dodges the issue, and tells another lie. I wrote:
O’Neill also goes on to lie, as he usually does, with his next accusation: that my theory of an interpolation “requires” Josephus to have forgotten to designate the patronymic at first mention of a new Jesus. This is a lie, because it omits the fact that in my article I propose the text in fact originally read “James the brother of Jesus ben Damneus”…
What does O’Neill have to say about this? Nothing. He evades the matter, and moves the goal posts by pretending we were arguing about something else. Take careful note here: this is how dishonest he is. He lied to Ehrman, and the public, about what my paper argued. I demonstrated that he lied about it. And then he pretends that that didn’t happen, and tries to make up a new argument instead. His original argument was that my paper’s thesis required the supposition that Josephus didn’t assign a patronymic to the Jesus he was talking about. Since my paper explicitly lays out why it requires no such supposition, O’Neill lied to Ehrman. That’s what happened.
That’s before we even get to the methodological problem with O’Neill’s argument. Josephus sometimes didn’t state the patronymics of persons he names. Theudas and Epaphroditus for example; a mention of a high priest Eleazar in the first book of the Antiquities; another Eleazar in the last book; a certain Judas the Essene; a high priest named Jesus at one point in the Wars; even the Ananias in the following passage isn’t distinguished with a patronymic there (hence causing O’Neill to get wrong who he was); and so on. So my paper’s thesis does not even require that Josephus would do that here; he may have simply assumed the reader would know who he meant once he completed the story a couple lines later by identifying which Jesus he was talking about: Jesus ben Damneus. Which is the only patronymic appearing in this passage. And the only identity that makes any sense of the whole story as Josephus tells it (for several reasons, again, laid out in my paper: which you can read for yourself in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Most folks can add two and two together. But I also pointed out in my peer reviewed paper that the patronymic may have existed in the text in the earlier line, too, but was replaced with “the one called Christ” in error. A common occurrence in manuscript textual transmission.
But most importantly, and (duh!) obviously, the James named in this passage is given no patronymic either. So what James is this? Nor is his brother Jesus given one. For “the one called Christ” is not a patronymic; nor is it an intelligible designation at all, to anyone likely to be reading this passage in Josephus—anyone who wasn’t already a Christian, which is one of several reasons I list in my peer reviewed paper that we know a Christian must have written this (which reasons O’Neill omits to mention and never addresses; more dishonesty).
How could Josephus give us the bare name James with no patronymic, if Josephus usually gives patronymics? Could it be because Josephus did, and the copyist replaced it? Just as my paper proposed may have happened. Or could it be that Josephus thought it obvious to the reader he means the brothers James and Jesus the sons of Damneus, as subsequent sentences imply? Either way it’s awkward; most readers wouldn’t know what a “Christ” was, much less why it mattered if someone was called one, or why this one was. In my article I do indeed discuss what Josephus does usually do in cases like this: give an explanation or back reference, whenever referring to obscure facts like these (and I show he even does that here, for other facts less obscure than this)—only a Christian interpolator would think neither was needed. Moreover, Josephus would still have told us who their father was. Unless he didn’t know. Or did indeed tell us: as he may have, or goes on to do, just as my paper points out.
So O’Neill’s argument doesn’t even make logical sense. Which is likely why none of my paper’s peer reviewers saw a problem here. And they would have been actual experts, with relevant Ph.D.’s and subject-specific publications and experience, not rank unpublished amateurs like O’Neill.
But the point I made in my blog was that O’Neill lied when he told Ehrman my paper requires the supposition that Josephus omitted the patronymic, that I didn’t address that objection, and that this is therefore a “problem” in my paper. That my paper did address that objection, is what O’Neill lied about. And he can’t defend himself on that score. So he doesn’t. He instead changes the argument, by now asking whether “the one called Christ” is “exactly the kind of thing” we’d find in a marginal note (not anything I discussed in my blog). He then lies again by saying “Carrier doesn’t bother to actually argue this, he just asserts it.” Um. No. I cite in my article several scholars discussing marginalia, noting that they provide lists of examples. And I state reasons myself (that’s called an argument) for concluding it:
…the words and structure chosen here are indeed the ones that would commonly be used in an interlinear note, e.g., a participial clause—remarkable brevity for something that would sooner otherwise spark a digression or cross-reference, had Josephus actually written those words. (p. 495)
And my peer reviewers would be familiar with this literature and phenomena and thus be well aware I was right. Which is likely why they didn’t ask me to say more to establish the point.
Now, if O’Neill wishes to contend, for example, that an interlinear note (in this case what is sometimes called an interlinear gloss) would not be put into the same case as the word it is commenting on, why doesn’t he provide comparable examples of brief glosses not doing that, or quote an expert saying that wasn’t done? How, in other words, does O’Neill even know what he is saying is true? Did he read a textbook on scholia? Does he have a lot of experience in examining manuscripts? Did he study graduate level paleography under a world renowned expert at an Ivy League university? (Like I did…I’ve read several textbooks on this, examined many manuscripts, and studied under Leonardo Taran at Columbia University.) Do tell, Mr. O’Neill.
O’Neill insists, “Surely [the gloss being in the same grammatical case] alone argues against the idea that this phrase is a marginal or interlinear note.” Hmmm. Why then didn’t my peer reviewers say so? Maybe…because they know that’s not true? They would well know that putting a brief gloss like this in the case of the word the note is commenting on is a common occurrence.
For example, in a paper I presented at a conference at UC Berkeley in 2005, I showed (among other things) that the oldest Syriac manuscript of the Weights and Measures of Epiphanius preserves a Greek marginal note commenting on the meaning of Phalarênô, an epithet given in the exemplar’s text in the dative, and thus preserved in the marginal note in the dative. Nigel Wilson presents an example where synonyms of a word in the text are given in the margins; and they are given in the dative, the same case as the word being glossed in the text (Scholiasts and Commentators, p. 51). You can see an example yourself in an online edition of From Scholars to Scholia (p. 142): an interlinear gloss in a manuscript of Callimachus explains a word in the dative (kasignêtô) by identifying its referent as Melicertes, written in…you guessed it, the dative (tô Melikertô). This agreement of case was used to signal what words were being glossed, glossae collectae often retained this feature (giving us hundreds of examples), and it’s the very reason these marginal notes so commonly came to be accidentally interpolated into the text: they look identical to notes signaling a correction of omitted text. This is just a known fact in the field, demonstrated by the scholars I cited. (Consult also George Thomson’s “The Intrusive Gloss,” The Classical Quarterly 17.2 [November 1967]: 232-43.)
So O’Neill isn’t just incompetent and a liar, he even lies about his competence, pretending to know expert things that in fact are totally wrong and that he never really in fact knew were wrong. That’s who we are dealing with. A completely unreliable person.
More Examples
Similarly, O’Neill deploys a dishonest (or fantastically ignorant?) argument about how often Josephus provides his own back references or glosses when using the verb legomenon (“called”), completely erasing and ignoring my actual argument, which follows from no such fact. The verb used here is completely irrelevant to whether Josephus would need to gloss the obscure word Christos; and he certainly would back reference to his previous discussion of this unusual fact, had there been one. I give several reasons why he would, as well as examples of Josephus glossing and back referencing, even in this very passage! Examples being the thing O’Neill keeps claiming I don’t provide—further lying to his readers. O’Neill frequently claims I don’t argue things, that in fact I do. So just read my actual paper. Because you can never trust his account of it.
Likewise, O’Neill complains that I don’t “explore” all of the examples I show of legomenos Christos being a known Christian phrase, even though it (a) comes from the Christian Bible itself and is only otherwise used by (b) Origen, the very person I propose is most likely to have rendered this note. Does one honestly need to “explore” why Origen would add a note using an idiom from his own Bible and that he himself repeatedly and alone used? Or can anyone who isn’t a dunce already get why that’s a telling point?
But no matter. O’Neill is a liar. Remember? That’s right. I actually did explore the relevance of these examples. Here is what my article says:
[T]he completed phrase is (apart from a necessary change of case) identical to Matt 1.16 … (which happens to be a passage about Jesus’ family). This is not a phrase that Josephus would likely use in the same way as a Christian annotator would. Again, while not impossible for Josephus to construct on his own, it is far more probable that the phrase came from a later, Christian hand.
…
The material that [these passages] share is biblical (deriving from Matt 1.16) and thus Origen already has a non-Josephan source [for it].
…
[And] we have already seen that Origen quotes his own paraphrase, using the exact same six words, on three different occasions. However, none refer to the AJ or Hegesippus. These words are probably his own, inspired (as noted earlier) by the biblical wording of Matt 1.16, a passage that discusses Jesus’ family and lineage. It would be natural for Origen to use the Matthean wording, particularly if this thought originated in his Commentary on Matthew, where it appears. That Origen was fond of repeating the phrase suggests a familiar idiom. The phrase also appears in Matt 27.17 and 27.22, though there it is uttered by Pilate (as opposed to Matt 1.16, where it is uttered by the narrator [of the Gospel]), but a similar idiom appears in John 4.25. This implies that it was a common Christian or Jewish designation for the messiah; the author probably intended irony by having Pilate repeat it.
…
Like Matthew and John, Origen appears to treat the phrase as a common designation for the messiah, which he associated with his paraphrase of a source that he mistook as having authorial distance (“although he did not accept Jesus as Christ”—always a true description of any Jewish author, and, as we saw, an inference that could also have been made by a reader of the James narrative in Hegesippus, if he mistook which author he was reading). Certainly, as we have established, Origen does not quote Josephus.
Are you starting to get the picture? O’Neill is a thoroughly dishonest man. Who, when he isn’t lying, deploys thoroughly stupid arguments. One need only compare his crap, to my actual peer reviewed work, to see who between us has the sound and honest case to make.
Closing Example
Finally, I’ll skip ahead to another example. After hundreds and hundreds of more wasted words, O’Neill tries to recover his losses on the question of what Waturu Mizagaki said. Where he completely ignores what I actually said about that, invents me having said something completely else, and then “refutes” the fake argument I never made, and calls me a liar for having made it. Yep. Seriously. Holy fucking balls.
Here is what I actually wrote (emphasis now added):
Then O’Neill claims I engage in a mere “blithe dismissal” of the passages in Origen, where Origen claims to be referring to a murder of James in Josephus but is clearly mistaken, “on the grounds that Origen was somehow confusing Josephus with Heggisipus.” JECS does not publish blithe dismissals. It publishes detailed and referenced arguments. So, which do you think you will find in my article? A blithe dismissal, as claimed by a liar? Or detailed and referenced arguments, as typify published peer reviewed papers? Three guesses again.
O’Neill then says Origen wasn’t mistaken, because “Origen definitely could have read the trope of ‘the fall of Jerusalem as punishment for the execution of James’ into the text, as detailed by Waturu Mizagaki, ‘Origen and Josephus’ in Josephus, Judaism and Christianity.”
No such argument is in Waturu Mizagaki, ‘Origen and Josephus’ in Josephus, Judaism and Christianity.
O’Neill now tries to prove me wrong by quoting Mizagaki (on the very page I cited) saying this:
Origen does use Josephus’ historical explanation of the fall of Jerusalem but expands it. Origen tries to find the real cause of the fall in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. Here Josephus’ historical account is theologically interpreted. At this point, Origen’s approach is by no means historical.
Did you catch it? Insert the sound of a record scratching to a halt. Mizagaki argued Origen found “the real cause of the fall in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross.” Um. Where is James? There is no statement here from Mizagaki that Origen read “the real cause of the fall in James’s death.” There is in fact nothing discussed here about Origen getting the idea of James being the reason for Jerusalem’s fall.
Hence as I went on to point out:
Mizagaki never argues for such a thing. At all. Much less in any “detailed” way. He only discusses the remark on two pages (pp. 335-36), and simply describes what Origen says. He makes no case for it being correct. He doesn’t even say it is correct. There is no plausible way to even claim such a thing. So it is to Mizagaki’s credit that he attempted no such thing as O’Neill’s libel against him would have it.
…
What’s weird is that the very next chapter in that same book, after Mizagaki’s completely irrelevant chapter that contains no such argument as O’Neill claims, is specifically on the martyrdom of James, by Zvi Baras. He discusses the passage in question on pp. 341-46. Five whole pages! Know what he says? That Origen’s claim that Josephus credited the fall of Jerusalem to the murder of this James is “a statement not supported by the text reproduced above or by any other extant version.” Done.
Baras goes on to agree with me that Origen can only be confused. Josephus never said any such thing. Baras also mentions the theory that Origen confused Josephus and Hegesippus (the very theory I defend), and offers only one argument against it (that Origen would never make such a mistake), which I refute in my article with examples of Origen making exactly such mistakes—and with an extensive case showing he must have (so insisting he never could have is just circular argument).
Notice what’s going on here. O’Neill accused me (and hence my peer reviewers) of failing to address the possibility that Origen read the James passage in Josephus as having said God allowed the destruction of Jerusalem for the killing of James. He cites Mizagaki arguing this. Mizagaki never argues this. And Baras in the same volume explains why no one can think this today. Indeed Origen cannot have gotten that idea from Josephus. Much less have thought Josephus “said” that. So where then did Origen get the idea from? The most likely candidate is Hegesippus. Which in my peer reviewed paper I presented multiple converging lines of evidence in support of. Baras even admits that’s a going theory. And the only argument he gives against it, I actually do address in my article!
So once again, when O’Neill accuses me of not addressing arguments to the contrary, he is lying. He was also lying when he said there were arguments in Mizagaki I needed to address. But there are none. Not a single argument to the conclusion that Origen got the idea from Josephus that Josephus credited the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James. Mizagaki argues Origen “interpreted” the fall as due to the death of Christ. Which isn’t relevant to what we’re discussing. Nothing here about Origen finding this stated in Josephus. Or finding it in the James passage. Or involving James at all. And O’Neill is so dishonest (or so stupid), he actually thinks you won’t notice!
Conclusion
I see no need to continue fisking O’Neill’s massive word wall of continually specious and dishonest arguments here. I’ve shown enough to demonstrate he cannot be trusted. He cannot be trusted to tell you the truth about what I have argued. He cannot be trusted to actually know what he’s talking about. He cannot be trusted to know what expert peer reviewers know about the various random things he tries to attack, nor why the actual professionals who peer reviewed my paper did not consider any of the silly things O’Neill drones on about are “problems.”
O’Neill is a hack and a liar. So heed that anytime anyone directs you to his garbage again. First, check what he says against what I actually said. Then, if there is still an accurate representation of what I said, check whether what he argues in response to it is even relevant or not. If it survives that test, too, and I haven’t already responded to it somewhere, then let me know. Quote the exact argument (don’t just link to a giant word wall, but quote the specific argument that you already checked passes these two tests). Then state why you think it has enough merit to require a response. Otherwise, please stop asking me to waste my time on this guy.
Little Timmy’s off his rocker again. This isn’t the only topic he pretends to be knowledgeable about. I’ve seen him elsewhere mouthing off at people (myself included) who call him out on his ignorance and ineptitude regarding different topics. Glad to see you pulverise his latest collection of excretions.
Cranks tend to be obsessively wordy whiners who obsess over insults and personal honor, and thus respond to being challenged with elaborate slanders. When you catch them lying and screwing up, they build massive word walls devoid of relevance expressing only rage and anger and ad hominem speculation and excuses, consisting only of libelous insults, before or even in lieu of addressing any substantive facts of the matter.
Ironic coming from the unemployed blogger who spends all day whining when Tim Oneil posts an article, you fit your own definitions Dr. carrier. You call anyone who disagrees with you a fool, an asscrank, tin foil hatters, idiots and mentally insane. I think you are the one who is a crank.
This is exactly what a delusional person says: you have stripped all context and rested on a fallacy of false equivalence, then added pointless slander on top of it. I don’t just call someone an asscrank whom I disagree with. I prove it with evidence. It is an objective fact that O’Neill is a liar and an ass. Proved. Not surmised.
By contrast, O’Neill lies about the facts, lies about what I’ve said, and slanders me to no actual empirical purpose but just to convey ad hominem and well poisoning fallacies—which are insults that are not relevant to an argument; unlike calling someone out for lying about the facts and for fallaciously slandering those who contradict him, which is relevant to an argument (and thus not ad hominem or poisoning the well).
The fool cannot tell the difference.
And the wise know who the fool is in this exchange.
This is a side issue, but its the kind of thing I think about a lot. I’ve given some thought over the years to trying to say things like “you are lying” instead of “you are a liar.” Its an attempt to put the other person in a growth mentality instead of a defensive mentality. Or at least that’s how I feel when on the other end. Shrug. Food for thought.
Alas, though, I’m pretty sure O’Neill is beyond redemption. He can’t be educated. So he needs to be discredited.
The same goes for anyone who repeatedly lies even after being repeatedly called out for it. They have thereby burned any bridge of charity they could have asked for. They are then just liars. And IMO, by that point, that just has to be the story of them.
Larry Hurtado is the same as Tim.
He blocked any post on his blog which mentioned 2 Peter 1:16.
I wouldn’t class them the same. Hurtado is a fool who abrogates all his responsibilities as a scholar and even lied about the evidence. But all In Defense of the Faith. Because otherwise he’s an actual, qualified expert, and doesn’t engage in the “asscrankery” of ad hominem. He’s just a Christian apologist. Not an asscrank. He is merely dishonest and unreliable, when he lets his ideology and desires eclipse his actual skills and responsibilities. Like nearly every Christian apologist there is.
You concluded with the thought I had during reading your rebuttal: why waste your precious time on this guy? I’d rather see you discuss matters with credited people instead of these hacks.
So why did you? Were you asked to respond by many or were you lured into a response by the open attempts of putrid deceptions by O’Neill?
I hope you can leave these liars behind you without even bothering to respond to their annoying but wasteful stings. Your time is too precious.
Yes. I’m repeatedly asked “What’s your response to x,” and often x is something by O’Neill. Some of these requests come from paying patrons. This is the problem with cranks: they lie to the public, and weave seemingly plausible narratives, but the public doesn’t have the expertise to tell (not everyone can be a Ph.D. in a subject). So to combat “fake news,” we have to fact-check and thus respond to it. Hence we have sites like Snopes and Politifact. I have to operate the same way with my own material (since obviously you won’t find entries on it in Snopes, for example). The dividing line is just a triage (Do I have the time? Is there demand? Is it already obvious to anyone who reads what I’ve already written that they are full of shit so do I even need to bother? etc.).
To try and manage this, I aim as much as possible to teach people the skills to fact-check these things themselves, so they don’t need me to do it for them (e.g. my original Mummy Gospels article; my Atwill and Bishop and Acharya articles; the final paragraph of this article; etc.). And in a sense, this article serves that function too: it’s an exemplary case of what to look for to test a crank’s claims, and even to test whether what you are indeed dealing with is a crank.
Sometimes, also, I’m just outright paid to write responses (indeed my whole book Not the Impossible Faith was one such product). Or I choose the most influential cranks to answer, merely because the scale of their influence makes their disinformation a significant threat to society (e.g. my work on Keller or Strobel). And in a sense, O’Neill hits these marks, too, as he is constantly cited by atheists who think he’s refuted me on this or that (so his influence within atheism is remarkable for being so wholly irrational and unjustified). And for this reason I actually do have an offer in to fund another response to some other things O’Neill has written, so I may yet do another as a paid gig.
Finally, it can be useful to use a crank as a foil to educate the public on matters they are often misinformed about. Flynn’s Pile of Boners is an example of that. Flynn is a nobody. But his pile of boners was the most perfect representative of an extremely common storyline repeated all over the place by triumphalist Christians, that gets the history of science completely wrong. So it was a great teaching opportunity.
These are the usual considerations lying behind articles like this one, which otherwise would be a waste of time.
P.S. I should mention, though, that if there is any actual, qualified expert I haven’t responded to (on historicity, I maintain a complete list here), please let me know. They get priority of attention. The only ones in that category I might not bother responding to, are any who only make statements already clearly refuted or addressed in my published work (so that all I need do to respond, is point someone to the response I’ve already made).
Re your phrase “the obscure word Christos”, why do you say Christos is obscure when it is used about 40 times in the Septuagint to mean the anointed?
Josephus is writing for a Gentile audience. They would have no idea what “anointed” means in this context or why it was important enough to mention or what information it conveys about anything. Just as they didn’t know what a Sadducee was or why it mattered whether someone was one (such as in this very story, where Josephus knows he has to explain why it matters that Ananus the killer in this case is one).
And notably, “christos” is never used by Josephus anywhere else—not anywhere in the whole of the Antiquities even, which is more or less a paraphrase of the Septuagint; it appears instead only in these two suspect passages, neither of which connected to the Septuagint or its historical period. Yet in neither is the word explained, something only a Christian would not think was needed. Indeed, Josephus never uses this word even when he is explicitly describing messiahs (as returning Joshuas promising the end of the world and the triumph of the Jews: OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 4, the “Josephan Christs” class, per Ch. 6.5); thus the real Josephus actually avoided ever using the word.
Do you believe that Nazareth existed?
It’s an unknown. Nazareth most certainly existed by the late second century (we have textual and inscriptional evidence), and IMO probably in the early first, but the evidence we’d need to check to confirm or refute that is lost or inaccessible to us because people still live there. Meanwhile the arguments some have made against it, are factually false or logically invalid.
Strangely enough, René Salm wrote two books arguing against the historical existence of Nazareth.
Neither under peer review. And he has zero qualifications. He is also a bit of a conspiracy theory nutcase like Joseph Atwill.
Salm did get one worthwhile paper through peer review. Worth reading, along with its peer reviewed reply. But that paper did not demonstrate Nazareth didn’t exist. Only that it’s archaeology has not been consistently reliable. It’s a non sequitur to argue “some of the archaeology is dodgy, therefore Nazareth didn’t exist.” That Salm thinks that’s a valid argument is a part of why you can’t trust his methodology, and thus his conclusions.
Nazareth is a topic where O’Neill has mounted a vicious and illogical attack on Salm. Your statement “It’s a non sequitur to argue “some of the archaeology is dodgy, therefore Nazareth didn’t exist”” is true, but that is not Salm’s argument. His main point, as I recall, is that ancient Israel did not locate tombs in towns, but that is a requirement of the Nazareth existence hypothesis.
This is another reason why you need to stop listening to Salm. Towns frequently grow into and consume their graveyards. Jerusalem is a famous example. We don’t actually know where the Nazareth town was in antiquity, or where it’s graveyard then extended. The modern town is much larger, and has been growing and expanding its graveyard, for literally two thousand years! Inevitably absorbing each other.
So Salm’s argument is again just a total non sequitur. One that either ignores or hides from you the actual realities of archaeology in cases like this. Because, evidently, he didn’t tell you what I just told you. You need to ask yourself why. And what else Salm hasn’t told you. This is how he rolls. And it’s why he can’t get any of his arguments through peer review. (His one peer reviewed article, again, did not argue Nazareth didn’t exist; it just critiqued a single archaeological report.)
Dr Carrier, do you agree with O’Neill’s claim that the supposed Christian destruction of the Temple of Serapis in 391 A. D. is not historical as there is “no mention of any library in any of the five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum and an earlier mention of the library collection there using the past tense, indicating that it was no longer there when the temple was destroyed”?
No. That claim is illogical. (I assume you mean not to claim the destruction of the temple is fiction, but that it contained a library; that Christians destroyed the temple is a historical certainty.)
A person writing about the library’s destruction in the past, would use the past tense. And there is no reason for other authors to mention the specifics of what it contained. Therefore, that can tell us nothing about whether books were “removed ” from it conveniently some time before (there is no evidence any such removal ever occurred; it’s thus a crank fiction invented by a Catholic apologist pretending to be an atheist).
All sources who were alive at the time, say it contained a library. Though one, Marcellinus, clearly never visited Alexandria, as his account of it contains falsehoods derived from a textual error (in which burning of the docks by Caesar became confused with burning the central library, which we have physical and textual evidence probably didn’t happen, or else it was completely replaced in short order if it did: inscriptions and papyri attest to the library’s continued and prestigious existence from the 1st century all the way into the 5th), this means he was using sources that told him what the Serapeum contained. Another contemporary who describes it as if he had seen the place, Aphthonius, is even more explicit about it containing books at the time. Likewise John Chrysostom. Before that, Tertullian himself says it contained a library. After its destruction, Epiphanius declared the same. We have no reason to doubt these authors. Check out the sources surveyed here (and my discussion in comments here).
Thanks Richard, that all makes sense.
I still wonder, in terms of Bayesian reasoning, to what extent the likelihood that Jesus was invented also increases the likelihood that Nazareth was invented, and named after Jesus the Nazarene.
The continuity of the Jesus Myth with the Nazarite tradition going back to Enoch, Samuel, Samson and John suggests to me the strong possibility that calling Jesus the Nazarene initially indicated his imagined role as leader of this purity group. If the Nazarites then became suppressed under Roman rule, it seems plausible to me that saying Nazarene meant “from Nazareth”, even though this town did not exist, could have provided some political protection for the early Christians.
That is all just my own speculation, and I would be happy to adjust it if there is good counterargument. The absence of Nazareth from the list of towns of Galilee in Josephus and the apparent lack of awareness on the part of Origen of Caesarea of its location strike me as strong arguments against Nazareth existing at the time of Jesus, even if the archaeology is ambiguous.
On the archaeology, Salm compares Nazareth to other towns, and argues that the evidence from Gospel times is remarkably scanty and in every case involves motivated reasoning on dating.
There is no doubt that a Nazareth origin for Jesus was invented, by authors who had never set foot in the place and probably only knew it from published glossaries or gazettes (and probably didn’t even care if what they were saying about it was true, fully aware their foreign Greek audience would never check).
That doesn’t mean the town was made up. To the contrary, that they decided a scripture predicting the messiah would be named a Nazorian meant he came from Nazareth proves Nazareth existed when they wrote. Because a Nazorian isn’t a person from Nazareth. If they were inventing the town, they’d have therefore called it Nazor or Nazors, not Nazareth. This proves they were looking for a town that came “close enough” to the scripture they were reading, and Nazareth was the closest fit. But not well. Which means it existed. Because they were stuck with an ill-fitting town.
Sometimes Salm admits this, that the town existed when the Gospels were written. Even though that makes no sense of even his own methodology; if it existed in the latter first century, and was well-known enough by then for foreign Greek authors to know of it, what reason have we to believe it didn’t exist in the early first century?
The fallacy is in either of these inferences: “Jesus didn’t exist, therefore Nazareth didn’t exist” (there is simply no logical validity to that inference) and “Nazareth didn’t exist, therefore Jesus didn’t exist” (no logical validity to that inference either). Because regardless, the town was assigned to him not based on facts but the need to make his story fit the scriptures they had on hand (which include books not now extant, and that said different things than extant versions do: as I demonstrate in Ch. 4 of OHJ). Which they would equally likely have done to a historical man or a fictional one.
hello carrier i think there is a copycat here in puerto rico his name is richard santiago and he claims that you are crazy, deshonest and bla bla bla i will send you the link so you can verify yourself… it is in spanish so yeah i think you can deal with that. https://ateistaspr.org/la-analogia-rank-raglan-por-richard-carrier-y-la-existencia-de-jesus/?fbclid=IwAR2i0bPvJhAmKGxmEwy_pHwPVpa2E9Sj1RnM-XNHDFv1bxpv7rjCDIDYThE
https://ateistaspr.org/existio-jesus-nazaret-la-historia/?fbclid=IwAR2cFo5jJtn59FLVEkHkZg0V17xa6_XdWIA4JtLvayyWSFkTVFShiR3LjpI
HERE is another article claiming that Jesus existed from the same guy… can you deconstruct these please?
There are hundreds are articles like that online. I can’t be bothered to address even a fraction of them, for want of time alone. Least of all those from amateurs in foreign languages. I say, research and compose your own reply to him, by showing how they don’t accurately report what my arguments even are, and resort to logical fallacies and inaccuracies in discussing the evidence, using how I have already shown this for every argument of like kind, in On the Historicity of Jesus.
I don’t have time to dissect amateur arguments in foreign languages. But if you want to tackle this yourself, I’ve probably already provided all the material you need, in responding to others attempting similar arguments: see McGrath on the Rank-Raglan Mythotype, Is Rank-Raglan Indicative?, The Rank-Raglan Class Again, and maybe (if you need more), Is the Principle of Contamination Invalid?.
I’ll gradually collect more examples of the dishonesty and unreliability of Tim O’Neill here. For example:
The Vridar Collection, particularly the expose on Tim O’Neill’s dishonest (or incompetent?) treatment of the Ascension of Isaiah.
I’m curious if you have read this latest rebuttal and have a formal response.
Richard Carrier is Displeased Again (by Tim O’Neill)
https://historyforatheists.com/2018/10/richard-carrier-is-displeased-again/
Please use the search feature on my blog. It is located in the right margin near the top of the page.
Doing so you would have located on your own my response.
You can likewise search for my responses to all sorts of things that way.
It’s a handy feature.
The article you just cited is the current article. Not a rebuttal to Tim O Niel’s rebuttal.
What’s new?
Is there some argument he has made I haven’t already answered?
It would be very helpful of you if you could identify one.
Possible typo in this sentence I think? ‘The One Called Jesus’ should be ‘The One Called Christ’?
“But I also pointed out in my peer reviewed paper that the patronymic may have existed in the text in the earlier line, too, but was replaced with “the one called Jesus” in error.”
Keep up the good work!
Good catch! Fixed. Thanks.
Dr. Carrier, I read both of O’Neill articles on this (including the one responding to those post), and I have a question about his point about Josephus’s use of patronymics. O’Neill seems to argue for the following dilemma facing the view that the phrase “who was called Christ” is an interpolation. How would you resolve the dilemma?
Horn 1 of the dilemma:
Suppose that the original text said “James the brother of Jesus,” without using the patronymic “son of Damneus.” This would mean that when Josephus refers to Jesus a few sentences later with the patronymic (when he says that King Agrippa made “made Jesus, the son of Damneus, High Priest”), he would be using the patronymic for the first time.
You suggest that this isn’t a problem because “[Josephus] may have simply assumed the reader would know who he meant once he completed the story a couple lines later by identifying which Jesus he was talking about: Jesus ben Damneus.”
However, O’Neill argued in his first article that this isn’t how Josephus uses patronymics; there isn’t an instance—at least according to O’Neill—in which Josephus introduces someone without a patronymic and then uses a patronymic for that same person later. (Of course, there are some cases where he doesn’t use a patronymic at all, but that’s different from introducing someone without one and then using it for that same person later.)
So, this reconstruction of the original text is in tension with Josephus’s writing style.
Horn 2 of the dilemma:
Suppose that the original text included the patronymic, saying “James the brother of Jesus, son of Damneus.” Now, the problem from the first horn is gone. But according to O’Neill, a new problem arises: Josephus does not repeat patronymics “unless he moves on to a new anecdote in this narrative or there is another figure with the same name in the narrative and he needs to differentiate between them.” (There don’t appear to be any examples to the contrary.)
So, this reconstruction of the original text is also in tension with Josephus’s writing style.
Maybe one solution is this. Regardless of whether the first mention of Jesus in the original text included the patronymic “son of Damneus,” perhaps the line where Josephus does include the patronymic is special or unusual in some way that would warrant using it. And here’s a reason for thinking that the line with the patronymic is unusual: throughout this anecdote, Josephus seems to refer to Agrippa as simply “the King,” but in the last line, he explicitly mentions the full name “King Agrippa.” It’s unclear why he does this—maybe he wanted to more formally describe an important act taken by the king and therefore use everyone’s full names. But if that’s true, then that would also explain why he uses the patronymic for Jesus again.
The latter is sound reasoning. The story is in a list of explanations of the succession of high priests. He had to close by giving the full name of the priest thus elevated, whose reasons for elevation were just given, precisely because this is a story about the succession of high priests, and this is the closing of that story.
But also, it’s simply common for Josephus to occasionally do things differently; he is not a computer. Thus, to have double used a patronymic (which indeed he sometimes does, and here may have felt he had to if he thought the way he introduced the matter was convoluted) or to have closed with a patronymic (which indeed he sometimes does, and here may have felt he had to if he thought the way he thus closed the matter made the rest clear) would simply be on a par with all other occasional deviations of style found throughout Josephus.
(BTW, whether Josephus “never” introduces someone and gives their patronymic later has yet to be shown; O’Neill asserts it, but gives no indication of even having checked if that assertion is true; much less true of stories as briefly told as this one, which would be the only relevant comparand; and much less in enough cases to be statistically significant, e.g. if Josephus only told stories this short ending with the patronymic a couple of other times, that’s not enough to establish a reliable trend regarding how he would introduce the person in question here.)
The bottom line is, all the other evidence I list is vastly less probable, in conjunction, than either of these features would be (closing rather than opening with the patronymic; or opening and closing with the patronymic), so neither of those scenarios argues for authenticity. Josephus deviates from mechanical style far too often throughout his works for such minor issues to carry even a fraction of the weight of the actual evidence I enumerate on the other side.
Moreover, on the supposition of authenticity, the problems O’Neill alleges are worse (no patronymic is given for either James or Jesus, for example, nor is the appellation “Christ” explained, etc.). So the improbability of the produced result is the same on either side of the likelihood ratio, canceling out (i.e. the text “is weird” whether authentic or not, for essentially the same reasons O’Neill is obsessing over). This evidence thus has less than low weight. It has effectively no weight. It is therefore irrational to use it as an excuse to ignore all the far weightier accumulated evidence to the opposite conclusion.