So, your comment, that’s ad hominem. You did not identify a single factual or logical error in this article. You just slagged me and it off with insults supported by no examples—not even of your assertions, much less their relevance.

This is why Christians are completely unreliable thinkers. They pull emotional shit like you just did, and don’t rationally engage with any evidence or pertinent logic. This is annoying and you should be ashamed of behaving like this.

You are painting Christians as emotional and irrational here. Presumably you’d like them painted the other way around. So why not act the other way around? Why not actually engage with what was argued?

That one law was convoluted. It allowed someone to compel testimony of their neighbor to testify that they had committed no sins in a specific span of time. That law says you could not compel women to do this. Note that it lists them separately from “those who are not qualified” so women were excluded from this subpoena rule for reasons other than that they were not qualified (that the latter have to be listed separately proves women were otherwise qualified to testify in courts). Close kin are also exempt, take note. Which is also not usually the case (they are qualified to testify in every other instance in courts, unless specific exemptions are stated, as here).

So this was a specific prohibition on women as witnesses?

I cover that passage in detail in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 308-09. But in short, “Mishnah, Shabuot 4:1 only pertains to a special kind of oath established by Leviticus 5:1. For women can take every other kind of oath, even those taken at trial,” w. note 26, “Mishnah, Shabuot 3:10-11, 5:1, 7:7-8.” The oath in this one exceptional case regards one’s compelled negative testimony to oneself not breaking the rule that if you know of a sin your neighbors have committed and don’t report it, you are guilty (like an accomplice after the fact), an oath a neighbor can compel another neighbor to take in court. Women are exempt from this one peculiar law (for reasons not stated; I offer some speculations though). In short, you could not compel a woman to take this oath in defense of yourself in court.

An oath of evidence applies to men but not to women, to those who are not near of kin but not to such as are kinsfolk, to those who are eligible but not to those who are not qualified. And it applies only to such as are fit to give evidence

Do you believe this applies to court procedures rather than the credibility of a woman’s testimony?

Might have posted this comment twice

Ah. I see. You are quibbling over semantics.

(Rolls eyes)

I’ll amend the phrase to satisfy your pedantic query.

(Replying to myself, because there isn’t a ‘reply’ button below your response.)

I’m not disputing that Josephus trusts these women’s testimony – I’m questioning your use of the expression “explicitly says”, which you clearly are using differently to the way I use it.

Your response lays out why we can deduce that conclusion from these passages. But that kind of demonstrates my point: Josephus “clearly implies” or “clearly demonstrates” such trust, but he never here “explicitly says” anything about trust, or even about testimony. It’s all entailed, but it’s not at all explicit (in the way I understand that concept).

I realise this is rather nitpicky, but you’re normally pretty disciplined in your use of language, even in blog comments – so this instance kind of sticks out for me.

I’m not sure what you mean. If he didn’t trust them, he’d say so, or not use or mention them. He has no reason to mention them otherwise, much less to state their credentials (indicating he intends us to trust them as well) and how they came to be a source (in fact, his only source), than to attest his trust in their testimony. If he distrusted it, he either wouldn’t use it, wouldn’t mention them, or would caution his readers. I cannot fathom how you could think otherwise.

You can tell this by the way he even mentions them (here and here). All the latest peer reviewed scholars on this subject concur with what I am telling you (see my links and list here). Of course he has to do this: he could not have narrated what happened but for trusting the witnesses he claims to have had. Which is why scholars now suspect he is lying: he probably had no idea what happened because every witness was dead. So he invented witnesses to justify telling a courageous narrative, and tries to convince us of their reliability by citing their respectable status. The mere fact that he goes out of his way to mention “two” women in each case and to list their credentials (why they are respectable, ergo trustworthy), who just “happened” to escape two mass suicides, is too suspicious to credit. But even if it’s true, his entire citation of them, its entire manner and use, entails his trust in them.

Can you expand on how Josephus in these verses explicitly says he trusts their testimony? Isn’t that trust instead implied by what he says?