Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ian Hutchesson" <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

>Well, Ian, I'm sorry if I missed the evidence that Chronicles is later than
>Josephus.

It is actually difficult to talk of Chronicles being later than Josephus. I
mentioned that Josephus may have used the same prinipial source as that used 
by the
books of Sam/Kgs and Chr. I have indicated that the high priestly list in 
1Chr6 is
later than Josephus and Ezra.

>I didn't see any. It must have been so meagre that my eye passed
>straight over it. Perhaps you can repost it.

Evidence rarely interests your eye, Peter! The inerrantist eye tends to 
minimize,
then to rejecct anything that disturbs the notion of inerrancy.

>Or are you simply referring to your table of comparison between Samuel,
>Chronicles and Josephus?

This is part of the evidence. The high priestly list was another. The fact 
that
Josephus knows none of the "special" material in Chronicles.

>I did deal briefly with that meagre evidence on
>11th March, and Stephen Carlson did in more detail.

Stephen merely stated his faith in things which allowed him not to accept the
priority of GMk in the synoptic problem, his Lachmann fallacy fallacy.

As you haven't particularly looked into the situation, you are giving a normal
knee-jerk reaction. I merely gave an example of one section of the three 
works. I
have looked at others and found a similar situation. The claim that Josephus 
is
trying to harmonize is against his modus operandi: he would have to go from 
one
source to another in the stretch of one sentence. Have you got may clear 
examples in
antiquity of that sort of use of source materials?

>As we demonstrated,
>there are several possible interpretations of that evidence, only one of
>which has Chronicles later than Josephus.

You merely gave more complicated possibilities, which as you were happy to use
Occam's razor, are immediately eliminated.

>Meanwhile, perhaps you can deal properly with the evidence which has been
>presented as disproving your hypothesis. You wrote about a Qumran text:
>"Also I haven't seen the tiny Chr frag which is described as having one or
>two words left on each line. It's marvelous that there was enough to attempt
>an identification." Well, I suggest that you try to see this fragment and
>make a proper assessment of the evidence, rather than make this sort of
>unsubstantiated slur against what are presumably others' scholarly findings.

I suggest if you would like to falsify my hypothesis that you at least 
present the
material that you claim falsifies it. I can't do all your work for you, can 
I? I did
cite the fact that there was such a fragment. You need to falsify, well, do 
the
work. You can't simply rely on other people who may, because there are no 
fragments
of Chronicles from the DSS, want that there be. One need only think of those
scholars who attempted to find bits of the NT amongst the tiny fragments from 
cave
#7.


Ian