This is exactly what a delusional person says: you have stripped all context and rested on a fallacy of false equivalence, then added pointless slander on top of it. I don’t just call someone an asscrank whom I disagree with. I prove it with evidence. It is an objective fact that O’Neill is a liar and an ass. Proved. Not surmised.

By contrast, O’Neill lies about the facts, lies about what I’ve said, and slanders me to no actual empirical purpose but just to convey ad hominem and well poisoning fallacies—which are insults that are not relevant to an argument; unlike calling someone out for lying about the facts and for fallaciously slandering those who contradict him, which is relevant to an argument (and thus not ad hominem or poisoning the well).

The fool cannot tell the difference.

And the wise know who the fool is in this exchange.

Cranks tend to be obsessively wordy whiners who obsess over insults and personal honor, and thus respond to being challenged with elaborate slanders. When you catch them lying and screwing up, they build massive word walls devoid of relevance expressing only rage and anger and ad hominem speculation and excuses, consisting only of libelous insults, before or even in lieu of addressing any substantive facts of the matter.

Ironic coming from the unemployed blogger who spends all day whining when Tim Oneil posts an article, you fit your own definitions Dr. carrier. You call anyone who disagrees with you a fool, an asscrank, tin foil hatters, idiots and mentally insane. I think you are the one who is a crank.

The latter is sound reasoning. The story is in a list of explanations of the succession of high priests. He had to close by giving the full name of the priest thus elevated, whose reasons for elevation were just given, precisely because this is a story about the succession of high priests, and this is the closing of that story.

But also, it’s simply common for Josephus to occasionally do things differently; he is not a computer. Thus, to have double used a patronymic (which indeed he sometimes does, and here may have felt he had to if he thought the way he introduced the matter was convoluted) or to have closed with a patronymic (which indeed he sometimes does, and here may have felt he had to if he thought the way he thus closed the matter made the rest clear) would simply be on a par with all other occasional deviations of style found throughout Josephus.

(BTW, whether Josephus “never” introduces someone and gives their patronymic later has yet to be shown; O’Neill asserts it, but gives no indication of even having checked if that assertion is true; much less true of stories as briefly told as this one, which would be the only relevant comparand; and much less in enough cases to be statistically significant, e.g. if Josephus only told stories this short ending with the patronymic a couple of other times, that’s not enough to establish a reliable trend regarding how he would introduce the person in question here.)

The bottom line is, all the other evidence I list is vastly less probable, in conjunction, than either of these features would be (closing rather than opening with the patronymic; or opening and closing with the patronymic), so neither of those scenarios argues for authenticity. Josephus deviates from mechanical style far too often throughout his works for such minor issues to carry even a fraction of the weight of the actual evidence I enumerate on the other side.

Moreover, on the supposition of authenticity, the problems O’Neill alleges are worse (no patronymic is given for either James or Jesus, for example, nor is the appellation “Christ” explained, etc.). So the improbability of the produced result is the same on either side of the likelihood ratio, canceling out (i.e. the text “is weird” whether authentic or not, for essentially the same reasons O’Neill is obsessing over). This evidence thus has less than low weight. It has effectively no weight. It is therefore irrational to use it as an excuse to ignore all the far weightier accumulated evidence to the opposite conclusion.

Horn 1 of the dilemma:

Suppose that the original text said “James the brother of Jesus,” without using the patronymic “son of Damneus.” This would mean that when Josephus refers to Jesus a few sentences later with the patronymic (when he says that King Agrippa made “made Jesus, the son of Damneus, High Priest”), he would be using the patronymic for the first time.

You suggest that this isn’t a problem because “[Josephus] may have simply assumed the reader would know who he meant once he completed the story a couple lines later by identifying which Jesus he was talking about: Jesus ben Damneus.”

However, O’Neill argued in his first article that this isn’t how Josephus uses patronymics; there isn’t an instance—at least according to O’Neill—in which Josephus introduces someone without a patronymic and then uses a patronymic for that same person later. (Of course, there are some cases where he doesn’t use a patronymic at all, but that’s different from introducing someone without one and then using it for that same person later.)

So, this reconstruction of the original text is in tension with Josephus’s writing style.

Horn 2 of the dilemma:

Suppose that the original text included the patronymic, saying “James the brother of Jesus, son of Damneus.” Now, the problem from the first horn is gone. But according to O’Neill, a new problem arises: Josephus does not repeat patronymics “unless he moves on to a new anecdote in this narrative or there is another figure with the same name in the narrative and he needs to differentiate between them.” (There don’t appear to be any examples to the contrary.)

So, this reconstruction of the original text is also in tension with Josephus’s writing style.

Maybe one solution is this. Regardless of whether the first mention of Jesus in the original text included the patronymic “son of Damneus,” perhaps the line where Josephus does include the patronymic is special or unusual in some way that would warrant using it. And here’s a reason for thinking that the line with the patronymic is unusual: throughout this anecdote, Josephus seems to refer to Agrippa as simply “the King,” but in the last line, he explicitly mentions the full name “King Agrippa.” It’s unclear why he does this—maybe he wanted to more formally describe an important act taken by the king and therefore use everyone’s full names. But if that’s true, then that would also explain why he uses the patronymic for Jesus again.

Good catch! Fixed. Thanks.

“But I also pointed out in my peer reviewed paper that the patronymic may have existed in the text in the earlier line, too, but was replaced with “the one called Jesus” in error.”

Keep up the good work!

What’s new?

Is there some argument he has made I haven’t already answered?

It would be very helpful of you if you could identify one.

The article you just cited is the current article. Not a rebuttal to Tim O Niel’s rebuttal.

Please use the search feature on my blog. It is located in the right margin near the top of the page.

Doing so you would have located on your own my response.

You can likewise search for my responses to all sorts of things that way.

It’s a handy feature.

Richard Carrier is Displeased Again (by Tim O’Neill)
https://historyforatheists.com/2018/10/richard-carrier-is-displeased-again/