re albert sabin in article quim innem ctron news ctron com king ctron com john e king writes rfox charlie usd edu writes 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 i ve seen this claim about the josephus insert flying around the net too often to continue to ignore it perhaps it s true was there only one josephus manuscipt if there were say copies the forger would have to put his insert into all of them by the same token since josephus was a historian why are biblical scholars raising the flag historical scholars i would think would have a better handle on these ancient secular documents can you give researchers documents page numbers etc jack i became aware of the claim years ago so i decided to check it out on my own but then that was in bn times before net so here are some references see robin lane fox s the unauthorized version p where lane fox writes the one passage which appears to comment on jesus career is agreed to be a christian addition in my re albert sabin response c u sj sunfish usd edu to jim lippard april i noted that consensus is typically indicated subtly as in elaine pagel s the gnostic gospels p to wit a comment attributed to josephus reports emphasis mine scholars sometimes do not even mention the two josephus entries another subtlety reflecting consensus so far as i can deduce today s consensus is built on at least three things the long passage is way out of context origen did not know about the long passage and the short and long passages are contradictory i don t know the references wherein the arguments which led to consensus are orginally developed does anyone biblical scholars as i defined them include theologians and historians the former like the latter incorporate historical social technological and ideological contexts as well as theology so the distinction is blurred i didn t elaborate on that sorry in turn historians are compelled to incorporate theology can t say about the number of copies these were however bg times before gutenburg a hundred first editions seems exceedingly high counting on one hand seems more reasonable perhaps those mss without the long insert if any because anything is possible have been destroyed such a practice is certainly not foreign to religions anyway all we have are mss which have the two entries lippart in the message noted above talks about an arabic ms but here the ms date is critical rich fox anthro usouthdakota
