So tell me how you established that the Miriam and Joseph ossuaries are fakes?
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Why would there be an ossuary made for people who never existed? We don’t have one authentic Christian artifact that could prove anything.
Not a good example. The story in the bible is clearly intended to be read as an actual temporal sequence, which a scientific paper is not.
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Paraphrasing:
Boris: Caiaphas never existed
Michael: Here’s his ossuary
Boris: It’s a fake
Michael: How do you know?
Boris: Because Caiaphas never existed.
Circular arguments aren’t very convincing.
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What diagram?
You called the Miriam and Joseph ossuaries fake. How did you establish this?
112That was text, not a diagram.
This is a diagram:
14:54-65 Jesus before the council
A (54) Jesus is welcomed by the guards
B (55) The Council seeks to put Jesus to death
C (56-59) Testimony of the false witnesses
D (60) High Priest’s question: “Have you no answer?”
E (61a) Jesus is silent about himself
F (61b) The high priest’s unwitting confession: Christ son of the Blessed" (cf. 15:9, 18)
E (62) Jesus proclaims himself
D (63) High priest’s question: “Why do we still need witnesses?”
C (64ab) Accusation of the high priest.
B (64c) The council condemns Jesus to death
A (65) Jesus is beaten by the guards
The question to ask is whether the story could have ended differently. If this was a real story the council could have set Jesus free and he could have lived happily ever after. Or he could have been rescued by followers or the Romans. In real life pretty much anything could happen. But in a fictional story a scene like this can only turn out one way or there is no story.
Still looks like text.
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We can’t group all religious writings together like that. There were actually standards of accuracy in certain contexts. There also are ways to gage corroboration.
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Not surprised. To some fiction looks like history.
Not, I would suspect, to @Roy. I think that you assume hostility where you shouldn’t, and that this is an example of you missing the opportunity for discussion with someone whose views may actually interest you, if you come to it in the right spirit.
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I did not read the linked article you provided but I think I can still recall some of my grad school notes on this topic. @deuteroKJ can no doubt correct me, or at least update the scholarship if no longer valid.
(1) Annas (Annus in Latin), the High Priest during the early years of Jesus life, had been removed from office by the Romans. Nevertheless, he continued to “rule” in some ways behind the scenes, especially when one considers that he had a LOT of sons who succeeded him in the High Priest office.
(2) I don’t know that I can prove this from ancient sources but I had the impression that one of the reasons Annas continued to hold a lot of power (in addition to the fact that a series of his sons succeeded him) was for that very fact that the nation resented the Romans removing him from power (and that that sentiment was among the reasons why his sons succeeded him.)
(3) Caiaphas was Annas’ son-in-law. No doubt Caiaphas’ significant influence continued with Caiaphas as well. I don’t see any problem with both of them being present for a trial and both speaking up during the proceedings.
(4) In our society we do not find it odd at all for former presidents to retain the title of “President” as a permanent honor. President Jimmy Carter is our oldest example of this—yet nobody in the know ever complains, “There can’t be both a President Carter and a President Biden!” Even when all such Presidents are together in the same place at the same time, they all bear that title.
Thus, I’ve never considered the Annas versus Caiaphas as High Priest “contradiction” much of a problem. Perhaps my knowledge of this topic is as outdated as my scholarship in this field. I’m simply telling what I can still recall.
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Yes. I too was wondering that same question concerning the Joseph Ossuary (which I would prefer to call “The Jacob, son of Joseph, Ossuary” but nobody asked for my opinion when that name was dubbed.)
I had a great opportunity to examine this ossuary close-up for about 15 minutes a couple of decades ago (thanks to Emanuel Tov, a gentleman and a scholar) and I came away with my unspoken impression that the AHUY D’YESHUA (Aramaic for “brother of Jesus”) might have been added by a “different hand.” (Perhaps that different “handwriting” was the apprentice at “Joe’s Bone Box Emporium” who finished the job the next morning when the top engraver at the establishment called in sick that day.) However, I have absolutely no training in paleoepigraphy so my impression means less than nothing. Much more importantly, extensive patina analysis showed convincing matches between the surfaces of the ossuary box in general and the “inside” of ALL of the words’ etched-out letters. Moreover, soil analysis matched the specific claimed burial site.
Thus, all of the evidence that I’ve seen appears to indicate that the ossuary was created and inscribed in the appropriate era. (If it was a genuine ossuary of that period but had been engraved centuries later–whole or in part— then the patinas wouldn’t have matched.) So I am not aware of any convincing evidence that the ossuary is a forgery.
That said, we only can conclude from that information (if indeed it represents the best current scholarship on the subject) that the bone box was made and engraved for a “Jacob, son of Joseph, and brother of Joshua” [just to translate it in more familiar OT English Bible terms.] All three of those names were common in first century Palestine so I’m certainly not going to say WHICH Jacob (i.e., James) it designates from that era. But that ambiguity hardly makes it a forgery!
POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I know that statistical analyses have been published concerning the frequencies of those three names among the populace in those days. I just have no opinion as to their value.
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The issue is that Luke quite specifically names Annas the high priest in the 15th year of Tiberius, when we know Caiaphas was high priest at that time, in a sentence which has both Annas and Caiaphas.
This is one of many dents in the Luke-eyewitness hypothesis.
1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius… 2 under Annas the high priest and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
English translations paper this over, but the Greek says “ἐπὶ ἀρχιερέως Ἅννα καὶ Καϊάφα”—”under the high priest (singular) Annas, and Caiaphas”. The 15th year of Tiberius is 28 CE, putting us squarely in the high priesthood of Caiaphas. “Annas” is generally considered to be Ananus ben Seth, a very influential Jew who served as high priest from 6 to 15 CE and was still pulling strings in Caiaphas’ day. Thus, the usual explanation is that Luke is referring to Ananus/Annas by his former title, much like Josephus frequently did. Still, given the apparent care Luke gives in this passage to name various historical characters and establish a specific date, we would expect him to specify Caiaphas rather than Annas as the high priest.
One might consider it an example of evidence of Luke copying Mark, in a similar vein to how King Herod vs Herod the Tetrarch is evidence for Luke copying Mark.
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These are the lines of evidence that Boris has refused to engage with. Thanks for pointing them out.
Exactly!
“Moreover, soil analysis matched the specific claimed burial site.” You mean the dirt on the ossuary is the same as the dirt in the tomb? What a miracle! And this proves… what exactly?
Rumors of Caiaphas persisted
Though some claim he ne’er existed
“More bother and din!”
Caia’ said with chagrin
I’ll make my address unlisted!
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Grouping them together doesn’t entail we consider them all, or all parts of them, completely equivalent. Of course there are gradations at work here. Even so it should not be in dispute that no biblical text was under standards of accuracy comparable to those used in modern historical, legal, journalistic, or scientific methods. Not by a long shot. There’s simply no good reason to believe that, and considering the subject of religious writing more broadly, there generally never is. Ridiculous claims get accepted and spread like wildfire, and nobody bothers to check. And even where someone bothers to investigate and try to “debunk” certain claims for themselves, it does nothing to change the minds of everyone else who don’t, for whom the debunkers work fall on deaf ears.
Simply put, most religious people don’t give the slightest fork about what skeptics say. As soon as their beliefs are put under scrutiny and subjected to criticism and testing, their reaction is to perceive this as a personal attack and to further entrench in their beliefs. Attempts to criticize or debunk religious beliefs immediately transform said beliefs into a subject of self-identity, of personal pride, and of group loyalty, rather than the offered criticisms serving to provide any basis for doubt. Some few seeds of doubt are planted among a small minority, some of who proceed to eventually break with their former group, but the rest of the group just become increasingly recalcitrant to criticism and start developing apologetics in response.
This idea that there was ever a time where skeptical people could have somehow eradicated early Christian beliefs by undertaking a sort of public investigation and debunking is a total fantasy. UFO cults will spring up in the face of constant and repeating public refutations by journalists and scientists, even today with the internet, having people able to casually and easily reproduce and explain putative UFO-sightings with glare and reflection effects in typical camera optics.
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