Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Peter,

>How do you want to understand "par' hEmin gar ouk ekeinous 
>apodechontai tous pollOn ethnOn dialekton ekmathontas dia to koinon 
>einai nomizein to epitEdeuma touto"? To me it means "for by them those 
>learning the dialect of many nations are not accepted as they consider 
>this pursuit to be common". In this context "common" (KOINOS) implies 
>"vulgar" but the basic meaning of the word is "widespread". The only 
>difference from the English translation I gave earlier is that the 
>"dialect" is not specified as Greek, but surely this must be the 
>meaning.

I have very little knowledge of Greek but when I see that which I vaguely
understood reflected in your translation, it seems quite different from the
received translations.

You admit that <<in this context "common" (KOINOS) implies "vulgar">>. Does
this mean that we can forget the futile argument for Aramaic for a while?

>Your chain of conjecture is getting even longer if you rely on 
>Tertullian as confirmation of Josephus. What epigraphic evidence do we 
>have for the existence of Tertullian and the dating of his works? What 
>is the date of the earliest surviving manuscripts?

Do you want me to add Origen, Clement of Alexandria and the later fathers
(whose purposes of writing are clear)? Each of the authors help to build
the complex nature of the Christian scholarly world. Each of them is known
by those that followed as to who they were, where they wrote, what they
wrote and why. You are willing in a cut and burn effort to discard
everything to preserve the "integrity" of documents you have less knowledge
of regarding purpose, authorship and origin than of those you are willing
to discard to make your point. While they make up a part of the historical
fabric of church history, the documents and characters for whom you are
doing your apologetic remain just as impenetrable and historically
unsupported as ever.

>Now I have no doubts about accepting the historicity of Jospehus and 
>Tertullian, and few about Ezra (which is a different question from the 
>dating of the book that bears his name). But by the same rigorous 
>method which you have used to expunge Moses, David, Solomon, Ezra etc 
>from the historical record as "unprovable", you have to expunge also 
>Josephus, Tertullian, in fact almost everyone from the "classical" 
>world whose name does not happen to have survived on a block of 
>marble. 

For some reason you are unwilling to note the notion that writers like
Tertullian are part of an easily discernable historical context. You refuse
to see that the purposes for which they are writing are easily discernable
and belong to the historical context for which they were written.

For some reason you choose to overlook the evidence that Ezra does not
reflect the historical context in which the character has been placed. You
turn a  blind eye to the inconsistency of its discernable historical
references. You don't like the problem that the Aramaic of Ezra does not
reflect the period it was supposed to represent.

As the Jews had no interest in Josephus -- he was after all a traitor who
"sold out" his country to the Romans -- they had no reason to preserve his
writings. It was the Christian apologetic tradition that preserved them,
and the apologetic tradition didn't start to manifest itself until the mid
second century. Not long after the appearance of that tradition comes
references to Josephus. 

Josephus is the earliest reference to Ezra. If you want to discard
Josephus, then your references to Ezra get even later. No-one in the six
hundred years before Josephus saw fit to talk about the most important
figure of the Jewish restoration from the exile. You attempt at parallels
between Josephus and Ezra fail in your effort to cling to a historical Ezra.

>Did you not say this yourself not long ago? You cannot pick 
>and choose arbitrarily which figures you accept as reliable sources 
>and which you reject as unprovavble; you need to be consistent! That 
>is my point.

While I am quite convinced that Augustus lived, given the numerous statues
showing the progress of his aging, and that the pharaohs of the 18th and
19th dynasties lived (we have their bodies), and that even Naram-Sin lived
for we have numerous stele that he had erected in his time that relate to
archaeologically discernable events. Josephus has very often proven --
through information which matches the archaeological record -- that he is
relatively reliable, ie that he was of the time he principally refers to
and knows a number of the events of that time. This is not the case for the
information we receive from the "earlier" parts of the OT/HB. Jerusalem was
a village in the eighth century, as you will remember from the
archaeological evidence, and does not reflect the metropolitan hub of an
empire or even a substantial town (and topography discounts any substantial
building under the ramparts of the temple). No-one from other cultures
knows about the widespread kingdom of David and Solomon and there is
nothing in the archaeological record to establish such an empire. (And,
when you say that perhaps things have been exaggerated in time, this is a
relativistic argument that says "I accept some things but discard others
that don't suit my hypotheses".)

Our understanding of the past is based on evidence. I have looked at some
of the evidence in the specific case of the book of Ezra and noted these
following principal arguments:

1) The Aramaic it uses doesn't match the period;
2) It's knowledge of the period is not good; and
3) No-one acknowledges the work until after the time of Josephus
   (who knew 1 Esdras)
4) Its content contrasts with that of Nehemiah as to events
   (causing the long fruitless debate over who came first, when
   on the surface Ezra had to come first because of his lineage)

People want to say that #3 is an argument from silence, willing to say that
despite Ezra's given prime importance for the refoundation of Jerusalem, he
is *totally ignored for six centuries* (while Zerubbabel and Nehemiah aren't).

My specific interest was to look at the differences between 1 Esdras and
canonical Ezra. One of the interesting things I noted was Josephus's
preference for that and not canonical Ezra, using the precise order of
events, and form of names, from 1 Esdras. There are other aspects that
suggest the 1 Esdras priority.


Cheers,


Ian