re albert sabin in article c p t sunfish usd edu rfox charlie usd edu writes in article apr rambo atlanta dg com wpr atlanta dg com bill rawlins writes however one highly biased account as well as possibly internally inconsistent written over mellenia ago in a dead language by fanatic devotees of the creature in question which is not supported by other more objective sources and isnt even accepted by those who s messiah this creature was supposed to be doesn t convince me in the slightest especially when many of the current day devotees appear brainwashed into believing this pile of guano since you have referred to the messiah i assume you are referring to the new testament please detail your complaints or e mail if you don t want to post first century greek is well known and well understood have you considered josephus the jewish historian who also wrote of jesus in addition the four gospel accounts are very much in harmony bill i have taken the time to explain that biblical scholars consider the josephus reference to be an early christian insert by biblical scholar i mean an expert who in the course of his or her research is willing to let the chips fall where they may this excludes literalists who may otherwise be defined as biblical apologists they find what they want to find they are not trustworthy by scholarly standards and others why an insert read it i have a number of times the passage is glaringly out of context and josephus a superb writer had no such problem elsewhere in his work the passage has nothing to do with the subject matter in which it lies it suddenly appears and then just as quickly disappears i think this is a weak argument the fact is there are two references to jesus in antiquities of the jews one of which has unquestionably at least been altered by christians origen wrote in the third century that josephus did not recognize jesus as the messiah while the long passage says the opposite there is an arabic manuscript of antiquities of the jews which contains a version of the passage which is much less gung ho for jesus and may be authentic there is no question that origen in the third century saw a reference to jesus in josephus there are no manuscripts of antiquities which lack the references it is possible that it was fabricated out of whole cloth and inserted but i don t think it s very likely nor do i think there is a consensus in the scholarly community that this is the case i know g a wells takes this position but that s because he takes the very small minority view that jesus never existed and he is a professor of german not of biblical history or new testament or anything directly relevant to the historicity of jesus jim lippard lippard ccit arizona edu dept of philosophy lippard arizvms bitnet university of arizona tucson az
