A Statistical Content Comparison of Josephus's Jesus Account with Early Christian Descriptions of Jesus (original) (raw)
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Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2021
The controversial account of Jesus in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, has puzzling similarities to Luke 24.18–24, a portion of the Emmaus narrative. This article proposes an explanation based on established research into Josephus’s methods of composition. Through a phrase-by-phrase study, this article finds that the Testimonium can be derived from the Emmaus narrative using transformations Josephus is demonstrated to have employed in paraphrasing known sources for the Antiquities. Precedents are identified in word adoption/substitution and content modification. Consequently, I submit that the Testimonium is Josephus’s paraphrase of a Christian source. This result also resolves the difficulties that have raised doubts about the Testimonium’s authenticity, with implications for the understanding of the historical Jesus.
A MODEL RECONSTRUCTION OF WHAT JOSEPHUS WOULD HAVE REALISTICALLY WRITTEN ABOUT JESUS.
JGRChJ-18 Allen, 2022
ὁ χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν! (''He was the Christ''). When Pseudo-Hegesippius wrote De excidio urbis Hierosolymitanae (''On the ruin of the city of Jerusalem'') he did not see that exclamation in his copy of Antiquities written by Josephus. In Ps-Hegesippius paraphrase of the Testimonium Flavianum (TF), he would have certainly used that phrase in his Christianised document. When Jerome translated the TF for his book De Viris Illustribus (''On Illustrious Men'') he lifted it from Eusebius’ History and wrote et credebatur esse Christus (''he was believed to be Christ''). The Textus Receptus (''received text'' of Antiquities) has a third redactional layer stating ''he was the Christ''. This paper aims to examine at least three redactional layers in the TF.
A Flaw in McIver and Carroll’s Experiments to Determine Written Sources in the Gospels
Journal of Biblical Literature, 2014
published an article in JBL in 2002 in which they discussed experiments with Australian undergraduate students that might help with determining the existence of written sources in the Gospels. They suggested that sixteen words in exact conjoined sequence provided a clear indicator of the presence of copying. However, McIver and Carroll transferred the results of their experiments in English to the Greek Synoptics without making any adjustments for the differences in language. A noninflected language like contemporary English takes more words to say something than an inflected language like Koine Greek. The problem can be illustrated by taking McIver and Carroll's list of Synoptic parallels that feature sixteen-word sequential agreements and higher, and comparing these parallels with English translations. In practically every case, the English sequential agreements are substantially higher. The presence of this important flaw in the conceptualizing of the experiments places a major question mark over McIver and Carroll's case.
The passage about Jesus Christ in Jewish historian Josephus’s writings has been debated for centuries, as concerns its authenticity totally, partially or not at all. This brief “testimonium” is proffered by Christian apologists as the “best evidence” for the historicity of Jesus, but it has been declared many times to be a forgery in toto. A recent study by a renowned linguist confirms this analysis of the entire passage as an interpolation by a Christian scribe, likely during the fourth century or later.
Unraveling the Synoptic puzzle: stylometric insights into Luke's potential use of Matthew
Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2023
The literary sources behind the three canonical Synoptic Gospels, namely Luke, Matthew and Mark, have long intrigued scholars because of the Gospels striking similarities and notable di昀昀erences in their accounts of Jesus's life. Various theories have been proposed to explain these textual relationships, including common oral witnesses, lost sources or communities possessing each other's works. However, a universally accepted solution remains elusive. Leveraging advancements in statistics, data analysis, and computing power, researchers have begun treating this as a statistical problem and quantitatively measuring the likelihood of the di昀昀erent theories based on verbal agreements and stylometric features. In this paper, we rely on a very recent Machine Learning based approach to solve the synoptic problem. We use Machine Learning classi昀椀ers two-sample tests, a novel approach relying on the analysis of the success rate of binary classi昀椀ers to identify whether two samples are drawn from the same distribution, to detect di昀昀erences in sources within Luke's Gospel and variations in the edition patterns of Markan material between Matthew and Luke. This analysis is done on a pericope-per-pericope basis, de昀椀ned as thematic units encompassing teachings or narrative episodes. The results suggest signi昀椀cant dissimilarities in style and edit distance, indicating that the double and triple material within the Gospel of Luke likely originate from di昀昀erent sources. This suggests that Luke derived his triple tradition from Mark and not from Matthew. Despite the necessity of cautious interpretation due to the size of the dataset, our study thus o昀昀ers substantial evidence supporting the theory of Luke's dependency on Mark's material for his triple tradition and makes the two-source hypothesis, which suggests that Luke did not have access to Matthew's work, the most likely explanation based on our methodology.
A new method in establishing quantitative relationships between manuscripts of the New Testament
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022
New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscripts in a similar manner, using collations and variation units. This conventional methodology requires enormous amounts of time and manual work. Here is proposed a new method that does not require these preprocessing steps, enabling the establishment of quantitative relationships using manuscript transcriptions only. This is achieved by applying a technique called shingling, where the manuscript transcriptions are turned in a computerized manner into smaller pieces called tokens or k-grams. Then, a string metric is used to calculate the similarities between the tokenized strings. This method is efficient, meaning that it allows critics to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition. At the same time, it returns similarity values that are compatible with those of conventional approaches.
Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 2024
Recently, we introduced a computational framework that, given a partition of a text into two literary constituents, finds the best parameter settings for successfully distinguishing linguistic features to support that partition and evaluates the statistical significance thereof. We applied our algorithm to assess the literary uniqueness of the Priestly source in the books of Genesis and Exodus, focusing on the mathematical and statistical underpinning of our approach. Here we take a close philological look at the linguistic features found to characterize the two distinct categories.
A Statistical Analysis of the Synoptic Gospels
2006
A statistical analysis of two contingency tables calculated from the synoptic gospels is done by correspondence analysis (CA) and taxicab correspondence analysis (TCA). We deduce a variant of two gospel hypothesis from the results of TCA.
2022
In the past three decades, the usage of computer-assisted stemmatological methods has increased in New Testament textual criticism, affecting all subsequent critical editions. These are not a unified group of methods but a wide variety of techniques using computers and tree (or network) structures to depict the relationships between manuscripts. In this dissertation, different computer-assisted methods are applied to the manuscript tradition of the Acts of the Apostles in three peer-reviewed articles. The first two articles test two existing stemmatological approaches widely used in the field, the Coherence- Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) and the phylogenetic analysis of manuscripts. These analyses point to complicated interrelationships between manuscripts of Acts that cannot be depicted using simple tree structures. Instead, the tradition can be depicted (to some extent) using networks that are applied, for example, to cluster manuscripts. The network methods are often based on distance calculations between manuscripts. Critics have long calculated these distances using collations and variation units, which take considerable time and limit the number of manuscripts taken into the analysis. The third article introduces a new method and a software package named Relate to establish quantitative relationships between manuscripts. The proposed method aims to be more efficient than any existing techniques. The preliminary assessments show that the results of the method are compatible with those of conventional techniques but take only a fraction of the time. The introductory material introduces an evolutionary theoretical framework to the manuscript tradition of Acts. It uses models from cultural evolution to explain the phenomena seen in the manuscripts. Previous stemmatological studies have shown that the phenomena and problems of textual criticism are like those of evolutionary biology. These parallel phenomena have enabled critics to use sophisticated phylogenetic applications in textual criticism that were originally developed to study biological evolution. This dissertation investigates the interdisciplinary possibilities that evolutionary biology and cultural evolution can offer to textual criticism. Even though some New Testament textual critics would prefer to abandon all the clustering paradigms in the field, the analysis conducted here, particularly in the second article, reveals that these suggestions are premature. The survey also demonstrates that it is possible to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition of the New Testament by giving a more prominent role to digital techniques in stemmatological analysis.
2023
We present a pipeline for a statistical textual exploration, offering a stylometry-based explanation and statistical validation of a hypothesized partition of a text. Given a parameterization of the text, our pipeline: (1) detects literary features yielding the optimal overlap between the hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, (2) performs a hypothesis-testing analysis to quantify the statistical significance of the optimal overlap, while conserving implicit correlations between units of text that are more likely to be grouped, and (3) extracts and quantifies the importance of features most responsible for the classification, estimates their statistical stability and cluster-wise abundance. We apply our pipeline to the first two books in the Bible, where one stylistic component stands out in the eyes of biblical scholars, namely, the Priestly component. We identify and explore statistically significant stylistic differences between the Priestly and non-Priestly components.