That website has disappeared from the web and was not archived by the Waybac Machine.

I can’t comment on any specifics there (I don’t watch O’Neill videos and avoid reading him as much as I can now), but of course that’s all bullshit. My book on historicity already refutes him on the Jesus angle, and the rest is soundly refuted in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. He has never actually responded to either, despite all his bluster and bloviation.

Yep. Just had my first interactions with Tim (the tool) O’Neil. Need to keep it brief. He has zero evidence for a real jesus person and relies on some scholars he points to…and he’s a conservative arrogant spelling nazi, who doesnt fix his own blog. But he thinks he knows better than most prominent atheists, because the stars shine upon him. He just started a video series, correcting atheists, because they’re all mythicists (he doesnt need evidence of jesus) and christianity largely (apparently) played a positive role in science throughout middle ages etc., which all atheists got wrong.

Footnote: I said in my Origen paper. Available in Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

Whealey: Alas. Such is the fate of most academic monographs today.

Use your local public library. The reference librarian will help you apply for an interlibrary loan. You can get any book, or indeed even any article, for free that way (or for a nominal fee).

On the footnote you cite, are you referring to Ken Olson’s article A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum or something different? I also can’t find Alice Whealey’s Josephus On Jesus in any libraries around me and I found one copy on Amazon for over 900 bucks!

I published a response a year ago.

At the end he actually attempts to make some actual rebuttals and counter-points concerning the writings of Josephus. More specifically he attempts to offer some clarification on his position about how Josephus introduces new characters. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

A deliberate interpolation in the James passage would not be so erroneous and obscure. Christians would have composed a paragraph or at least a few lines and referenced Christianity and Christian interests more explicitly, as the TF did. For more on why a deliberate interpolation thesis doesn’t work for the James passage, consult the scholars I actually cite and footnote on this point in the Origen paper. They have collectively several paragraphs of argument that hold merit on this.

Your argument for an accidental interpolation sounded very plausible, but I didn’t come away from reading it with a feeling that a deliberate interpolation was less probable. When you briefly assessed arguments for a deliberate interpolation as relying on too many assumptions, it was treated in isolation from the TF, but given that the TF is a very deliberate forgery, and that it exists in the same text preserved by the same people, this shows us that the caretakers at Origen’s library in Caesarea had no ethical constraints in the deliberate tampering of the text you are examining, so there’s no need to postulate an accidental interpolation as more probable than a deliberate one, especially since the first person to mention AJ 20.2000 is also the first person to mention the TF, and if Eusibius is the main culprit for the TF, would that not make him equally suspect in a deliberate corruption of AJ 20.200?

It seems to me that in order for an accidental interpolation, we’d have to assume that the caretakers genuinely wanted to preserve Josephus correctly, which is understandable in normal circumstances, but in this situation, we have the TF inserted in there, which changes everything. Plus, now that you’ve proven that Origen only thought that he found a reference to James, the brother of Jesus, in Josephus, and actually didn’t, we now have a motive to place on the caretakers for why they would choose that particular spot in AJ to fabricate a mention of Jesus.

What are your thoughts? If there are any errors in my logic here, or if there are facts/premises I have glossed over or am ignorant about, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll do that sometime in the coming months. I’ve dealt with Joshua Sommer’s apologetics before.