Describing the fact of how most Christian apologists behave is not bigotry. It’s history.

Address the actual point. Don’t make up trollish excuses to avoid it.

Please refrain from anti-Christian bigotry in your comments. Everyone comes to scholarship with their worldview and unconscious presumptions and blind spots, no matter whether having religious beliefs or not.

Saying Josephus did not accept Christ is simply describing the fact that he is an orthodox Jew, as Origen learned from Josephus’s last published book, his autobiography, in which he declares himself a Pharisee, after mentioning the sects he considered (none of which were “Christianity”).

There is no role for the TF here, which does not say anything about whether its author accepted the Christ or not, and in any event, even had it been “imagined” as doing so, Origen would then have mentioned far more details of the TF, because he would be required to by his extended argument against Celsus (as explained in OHJ, 335–36; and the related evidence in Obsolete Paradigm, 367–68).

As to why the forgery must post-date Origen is that Origen shows no knowledge of either passage (the Major or Minor TF). Nor did any of his contemporaries (e.g. Clement, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, etc.). The first anyone attests either passage existing is Eusebius. And all extant versions of either passage derive from either Eusebius or the same manuscript of Josephus he had (as I demonstrated in my peer reviewed journal study, reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Which pegs Eusebius as suspect number one. The only reason it could be Pamphilus is that we cannot rule him out (we have no data on the status of the manuscript of Josephus at that same library in between Origen and Eusebius, and the head of the library in between them was Pamphilus, Origen’s successor, who was also the tutor of Eusebius, his successor), and Eusebian style might have resembled that of his tutor, so if Eusebius did not forge the TF, Pamphilus is the only viable suspect left. See my discussion in respect to Schmidt.

The part you quote is a paraphrase of exactly what is in Hegesippus. Thus Origen has confused Hegesippus for Josephus. I demonstrated this in that same study. Likewise further in Obsolete Paradigm, where I cite numerous scholars now concurring with me on that. Your speculated (invented) redaction does not match Josephus (who never connects James to the loss of the temple—that’s in Hegesippus, as is all the rest, which is why your speculation is ruled out by this material coming from Hegesippus, not Origen; Origen is just paraphrasing Hegesippus, hence explaining all the coincidences of the same material there, but not in Josephus).

You’ve said the most likely forgers would have been Eusebius (born 260’s) or Paphilus (unknown birth, but assumed to have been after 250). How do you square these dates.

If the library began with Origin, wouldnt that point to Origin being the most likely forger (Eusebian writing style aside, he may have rewritten the original forgery to add more details to his liking)? Or are people reading Origen’s comment wrongly?

Or, conversely:

Looking at Origins actual text, it is awkwardly filled with his own opinions and nonsense.

“Now this writer [Josephus], although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless—being, although against his will, not far from the truth—that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus called Christ,—the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.”

If I delete everything that seems to be Origen’s own commentary and opinion, I end up with this:

‘Now this writer [Josephus], … in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, … , says … that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just … the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.’,

which seems to match the James passage (minus the one called christ interpolation). If this is accurate, he isnt referring to the TF at all.

What do you think?

Good question. Late is no vice! Relevance is king. And you nailed that metric.

Since this is the best place for it, I’ll paste my reply from elsewhere here:

Schmidt’s study is mere apologetics. It uses disinformation and possibiliter fallacies quite extensively.

Vridar is running an ongoing series on it that is catching this out in different ways. I will write on it myself eventually when I find the time, as I have caught several egregious errors in it already.

The bottom line is that almost everything he says against the overwhelming cases already made is in some way false. And his alternatives are built on massive (and thus hyper-improbable) epicycles, i.e. repeated fallacies of “possibly, therefore probably.”

He doesn’t even mention (much less address) Hopper. He fudges Olson. And he misses the errors in Goldberg. So everything documented in my “Josephus on Jesus?” article above still stands.

That is a fantastic find. I’ll look into it.

(It should also be noted that I wrote that sentence years ago. Several other scholars have published in agreement with us on this since. So I will revise that sentence to correspond with the present.)

Jesus is not likely to have ever quoted from or even have read the LXX. This is one of the reasons mainstream scholars have concluded he said very little of what is attributed to him in the Gospels. Those authors clearly were experts in literary Greek and used the LXX regularly, as it was more suited to a Greek reading / speaking audience (like Gentiles and Diaspora Jews).

As to when it was written, that’s a complicated question, because there are several versions, made in different centuries, and those versions underwent distortion in transmission just like the rest of the Bible. Wikipedia has an okay account. But in relation to Jesus, some version of the LXX began in the 3rd century BC and expanded to include the whole of what we call the Old Testament and Apocrypha before the 1st century AD. Other editions and versions were then formed in later centuries.