Word: josephus
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...South has long been a land of first-rate newspaper editors and second-rate newspapers. Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Josephus and Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer, Harry S. Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times and other Southern editors became more distinguished for the strength of their convictions than the quality of their coverage...
That passage by Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian writing in Greek, was for centuries perhaps the most cited piece of non-Christian testimony to the life and works of Jesus. Tacitus and Pliny mentioned Jesus briefly, as did Josephus in another shorter passage in his Antiquities. But Josephus' ingenuous paragraph appeared to be everything that Christian apologists could ask from a supposedly unbiased source: virtual confirmation of the basic truths of their faith. The trouble was, scholars began to object during the Enlightenment, that such a passage could hardly have been written by a nonbeliever, and had almost...
...clearly more authentic version of Josephus' testimony has surfaced. Professor Shlomo Pines, a Jew and professor of philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has announced the discovery of a long-overlooked text of the Josephus passage in a 10th century Arabic work. Despite the relative lateness of the work. Pines contends that it is far closer to what Josephus originally may have written than the traditional Greek text...
Pines considers it probable that the newly discovered passage was at least partially written by Josephus. His colleague at Hebrew University, Comparative Religion Professor David Flusser, regards its authenticity as certain. But the two agree in thinking that the new passage derives from a quotation of Josephus in an early edition of an ecclesiastical history by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a commanding figure of 3rd and 4th century Christianity. In a later edition of his history, they speculate, Eusebius inserted instead the traditional Testimonium Flavianum because it was more in keeping with the Christian conception of Jesus. Only the fact...
...irony is that whoever tinkered with the original Josephus passage -whether it was Eusebius or some other eager apologist-ended up making Josephus' testimony suspect to later generations. In his zeal to refashion Josephus' Jesus in the Christian mold, the tamperer succeeded only in weakening the credibility of the text-even as proof of Jesus' existence...