Talk:Legends

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Changes To Legends Article

JW:

Books 1-10. Siglum Location Shelfmark & Notes Date / Century R Paris Codex Regius Parisinus 14 O Oxford, Bodleian Codex Oxoniensis (Bodleianus), miscell. graec. 186 15 M Venice, Marcianus Codex Marcianus (Venetus) Gr. 381 13 S Vienna Codex Vindobonensis II. A 19, once Graecus 2 11 P Paris Codex Parisinus Graecus Gr. 1419 11 L Florence Codex Laurentianus, plut. lxix. 20. 14 Lat. (Latin version made by order of Cassiodorus in 5th/6th century - no details of MSS given) Exc. (Excerpts made by order of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century - no details of MSS given) E (Epitome, used by Zonaras and conjectured by Niese to have been made in the 10th or 11th century - no details of MSS given). Zon. (The Chronicon of J. Zonaras, 12th century - no details of MSS given). ed. pr. N/A The editio princeps of the Greek text (Basel, 1544) seems to be derived in part from some unknown MS and is occasionally an important authority. 1544 The original text is found in no single group of MSS. As a rule, the RO(M) group is superior (in i. 82, 148 (R)O alone preserve the correct figure, where the other witnesses conform to the Hebrew text of Genesis). At the other extreme stands a pair of MSS -- SP -- which when unsupported are seldom trustworthy. The other witnesses are of a mixed character, with the old Latin version being particularly important. Siglum Location Shelfmark & Notes Content Date / Century P Rome Codex Vaticanus Palatinus, nr. 14. Ant. 11-17, Life. 9 or 10 F Florence Codex Laurentianus plut. 69, cod. 20. Ant. 1-15 (see above under 'L'). 14 L Leiden Codex Leidensis F 13. Ant. 11-15. 11 or 12 A Milan Codex bibl. Ambrosianae F 128. Ant. 11-20, Life (with lacunae) 11 M Florence Codex Medicaeus bibl. Laurentianae plut. 69, cod. 10. Not used by Niese for 1-10. Ant. 1-20, Life. 15 V Rome Codex Vaticanus Graecus 147. Ant. 3-15 (originally 1-15; there are lacunae in 13-15). 14 W Rome Codex Vaticanus Graecus 984 Ant. 11-20, War, and an epitome of Ant. 1-10. 1354 A.D. E Epitome (as above) Lat. Latin version (as above) Zon. Zonaras (as above). Chiefly a witness to the E text. Exc. Excerpta Peiresciana et Ursiniana (as above, made at the orders of Constantine VII). Cassiodorus' Latin version Cassiodorus records ordering the translation of Antiquities of the Jews in 22 books in his Institutes XVII, 1. There is an English translation online: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/inst-trans.html. http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:N969ApytmzgJ:www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/josephus_antiquities.htm+1544,+josephus,&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us 47. Josephus Flavius, of Jerusalem and Rome, ca. 38-100 De antiquitate Judaica. De bello Judaico Augsburg: Johann Schüssler, 28 June and 23 August 1470. This first edition of any of the works of Josephus consists of the fourth-century Latin translation of The Jewish War ascribed to Rufinus, and the sixth-century translation of the Jewish Antiquities made at the behest of Cassiodorus. Printed only 14 years after Gutenberg's Bible, it is the first dated book of the printer J. Schüssler in Augsburg. In conformity with the still-living manuscript tradition, hand-illuminated initials in red, green, blue, and gold leaf were added in this copy after the printing of the Gothic-character book was completed. 1470 GERMANY

AUGSBURG, GERMANY


De antiquitate Judaica. De bello Judaico Augsburg: Johann Schüssler, 28 June and 23 August 1470.




IMAGES







  This first edition of any of the works of Josephus consists of the fourth-century Latin translation of The Jewish War ascribed to Rufinus, and the sixth-century translation of the Jewish Antiquities made at the behest of Cassiodorus. Printed only 14 years after Gutenberg's Bible, it is the first dated book of the printer J. Schüssler in Augsburg . In conformity with the still-living manuscript tradition, hand-illuminated initials in red, green, blue, and gold leaf were added in this copy after the printing of the Gothic-character book was completed.

DESCRIBING EDITION ABOVE First Edition of Josephus’s "Jewish Antiquities" and "Jewish War" JOSEPHUS, Flavius. De antiquitate Judaica. [Latin translation from the Greek, commissioned by Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus]. [And:] De bello Judaico. [Latin translation from the Greek, attributed to Tyrannius Rufinus of Aquilea]. [Augsburg: Johann Schüssler, 28 June-23 August 1470]. First edition of Josephus’s "Jewish Antiquities" and "Jewish War." Two parts in one large folio volume (15 1/2 x 11 5/8 inches; 393 x 295 mm.). [286] (of 288) leaves. Bound without the initial blank leaf and the first (contents) leaf. Gothic type. Double columns. Fifty lines. Capital spaces. Many manuscript signatures and catchwords preserved. Twenty-seven large initials supplied in red, with red (seventeen), blue (seven), or brown (three) penwork decoration. Smaller initials, paragraph marks, and headings in red. Late nineteenth-century half brown hard-grain morocco over marbled boards. Spine decoratively tooled in blind and lettered in gilt in compartments. Marbled endpapers. A few leaves with original leather markers at fore-edge. Short repaired tears on 5/9 (just entering text) and on 23/9 and 24/1 (not affecting text), a few additional minor marginal tears or paper flaws, minor worming at beginning and end, slight dust soiling to first and last leaves. An excellent copy, fresh and unpressed. From the library of A. Edward Newton, with his bookplate on front pastedown, ink annotations on front free endpaper, and a typed slip signed by him and dated March 1930 laid in. Booklabel of Abel E. Berland on front pastedown. This copy formerly belonged to the Franciscan Priory at Bamberg (early ink inscription on verso of last leaf). Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-after 93 A.D.) "visited Rome in early adulthood, returning to Jerusalem in 66 on the eve of the Jewish Revolt against Roman domination. He tried to persuade the nationalist leaders that war with Rome could lead only to disaster, but without success. When the revolt broke out in the same year, Josephus was given command of Galilee by the Sanhedrin. He survived the siege of Jotapata and was captured; his life was spared when he prophesied to the Roman commander Vespasian that he would become emperor, but he was kept in captivity until his prediction was fulfilled in 69. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 he did what he could to help his Jewish friends. Subsequently he settled in Rome, where he received Roman citizenship, a house, and a pension. His first work, Bellum Iudaicum (‘history of the Jewish War against the Romans’), in seven books, was originally written in Aramaic for circulation among the Jews who settled in Mesopotamia after the Diaspora, and later translated into Greek (Jerome called him ‘the Greek Livy’). The first part of the Bellum Iudaicum deals with the history of the Jews during the two hundred years or so before the revolt; the rest is devoted to the events of the war, many of which he witnessed in person. It ends with the capture of Masada. His next work was Antiquitates Iudaicae (‘Jewish archaeology’) in twenty books, a history of the Jews from Adam to AD 66, giving a fuller account than the Bellum Iudaicum of the events covered by the latter work" (The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature). This first edition of any of the works of Josephus consists of the fourth-century Latin translation of "The Jewish War "ascribed to Rufinus, and the sixth-century translation of the "Jewish Antiquities" made at the behest of Cassiodorus. The first edition of the Greek text did not appear in print until nearly seventy-five years later (Basel: 1544). The first dated book produced by Augsburg’s second printer, Johann Schüssler. http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:HjyeH-qOT-UJ:www.preteristarchive.com/JewishWars/1470_augsburg_schussler.html+1544,+josephus,+latin&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us


The Legends Article is now finalized and protected from Editing. If anyone has suggestions for Editing please leave it here for consideration.

--JoeWallack 13:30, 13 Jan 2007 (CST)


Comment by Zozimus 1-13-07 Re: Attempted Solution #3

Carrier:

"ATTEMPTED SOLUTION #3 - Inventing a New Date for Herod's Death"

Since there is no reasonable way to get Quirinius to be governor of Syria anytime before 3 B.C.E., the natural last-ditch resort is to argue that Herod didn't really die in 4 B.C.E. Since there is no clear evidence who was governing Syria after 3 B.C.E., or where Quirinius was in those years, inerrantists fantasize that their imaginary "earlier governorship" of Quirinius fell around then and simply failed to be mentioned. This still doesn't avoid all the problems noted before--from a total lack of evidence to the extraordinary implausibility of a second governorship. It also requires rewriting history.

Josephus already says Varus, not Quirinius, was governing Syria when Herod died (Jewish War 1.9-10), and despite attempts to argue otherwise, Josephus is very clear and precise in his chronology for these events and cites several first-hand sources for them, while the manuscript tradition for the relevant details is completely sound, so there is no plausible case to made that he is mistaken.10 Likewise, as mentioned earlier, evidence from coins corroborates all of this, including the reigns of Herod's successors, Philip, Antipas and Archelaus. The reign of Archelaus is further corroborated by Cassius Dio (55.27.6).

Josephus also mentions a lunar eclipse soon before Herod's death, and astronomers note there was such an eclipse in 5 B.C.E. and 1 B.C.E. Inerrantists therefore want Herod to have died in or shortly after 1 B.C.E. However, not only is all evidence against such a notion, but the Jewish Scroll of Fasting records the calendar day of Herod's death, and it preceded that of the eclipse of 1 B.C.E, but not that of 5 B.C.E. Since Josephus says his death followed (not preceeded) an eclipse, the eclipse Josephus mentions was probably that of the year 5. In the end, there is simply no evidence Herod died later than the year 4, and no plausible case to be made that he did."


Zozimus:

"Despite this, attempts are still made. One piece of evidence that has been put forward in defence of the date of 1 B.C.E is based on an article by a writer called David W Beyer, Josephus Re-Examined. As can be seen here, Beyer simply studied early printed copies of Jewish Antiquities and discovered that many had a later date for the death of one of Herod's sons, which could imply a later date for Herod's death. This mutated into a claim on Wikipedia that "a printer typesetting of the manuscript Antiquities messed up in the year 1544. According to scholars, every single Josephus manuscript in these libraries dating from before 1544 supports the inference that Herod died in 1 BC." In fact, of course, later printed editions benefit from a wider range of available manuscripts and the development of techniques of textual criticism - and all editions since Whiston's 1732 version agree that the earlier date is the correct one."


Response To Zozimus

JW:

In his related full article here:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html#alive

Carrier addresses Beyer as follows:

"What about that obscure textual variant? Finegan's only source for this claim is a mysterious, unpublished speech given by David Beyer.[17.3] In Finegan's summary, he never identifies any actual manuscripts, and though Beyer names them he does not identify their relationship to other manuscripts or their known quality or origins. All Finegan (and Beyer) does is "count manuscripts" and argue that older manuscripts are the most reliable. But neither is true, as any palaeographer knows. We have no way of knowing which of the manuscripts Beyer counted were copies of other extant manuscripts (and thus completely irrelevant to the question), and we have no idea whether the manuscripts he looked at are known to be reliable or unreliable or to what degree or in what ways. Older manuscripts can sometimes be poorer than new manuscripts, since newer ones can be based on even older but more reliable archetypes (see "On Calvinist Scorn of Textual Criticism" for more about textual analysis), and older ones may stem from especially faulty textual traditions. Moreover, Beyer examined only manuscripts in the British Museum and the Library of Congress--yet the best manuscripts are in France and Italy--one of which is the oldest, Codex Ambrosianae F 128, inscribed in the 11th century (the oldest manuscript Beyer examined was 12th century); and another is the most reliable: Codex Vaticanus Graecus 984, transcribed in 1354; both confirming a reading of "twentieth," and thus invalidating all his conclusions from the start. Finegan and Beyer seem ignorant of all of these issues. Consequently, we cannot trust them here.

When, instead, we examine all existing critical editions of Josephus, composed by scholars (Niese, Naber, and Thackeray) who themselves looked at the manuscripts, and properly, identifying relationships among them and assessing their reliability, we find a very different story. First of all, little more than a handful of manuscripts are worth even examining for this passage--yet Beyer is counting dozens (none of which are even among the best), proving that his investigation is completely disregarding the proper criteria of textual analysis. Second, all scholarly editions agree: the word for "twentieth" (eikostô) exists in all extant Greek manuscripts worth considering. Where does the reading "twenty-second" come from? A single manuscript tradition of a Latin translation (which reads vicesimo secundo). Beyer's case completely falls apart here. The Latin translations of Josephus are notoriously inferior, and are never held to be more accurate than extant Greek manuscripts, much less all of them. Indeed, this is well proven here: whereas the Latin has 22 for the year of Tiberius, it also has 32, or even in some editions 35, as the year of Philip, not the 37 that Finegan's argument requires. Thus, clearly the Latin translator has botched all the numbers in this passage. Any manuscripts that Beyer examined were no doubt either from these inferior Latin manuscripts, or Greek translations from these Latin manuscripts. Therefore, there is no basis whatever for adopting "twenty second" as the correct reading. Philip was crowned in 4 B.C. exactly as Josephus says, and just as all the other tetrarchs were who inherited portions of Herod's kingdom. This means Herod died in 4 B.C., exactly as Josephus claims."


JW:

Thus the relevant assertion by Beyer does not appear to be supported by the Manuscript and Authority evidence.

--JoeWallack 14:24, 13 Jan 2007 (CST)

Beyer's work clearly does not stand up to criticism, but that's not the point. Carrier does not seem to notice how inept Beyer or his supporters are.
All Beyer did was to examine early printed texts, not manuscripts. (The British Museum does not hold manuscripts - he means the British Library, which does, but he did not examine them). On discovering that none of the pre-1544 printed books had the "twentieth" reading, he assumes that the shift to the modern reading was the result of a printer's error which has simply been repeated. In fact, the reason is simply that, unlike the earlier texts - all in Latin, and (as Carrier states) based on inferior Latin manuscripts - the 1544 version was the first printed Greek edition, edited by the Dutch humanist scholar Arlenius and based on a high quality Greek manuscript owned by the Spanish ambassador to Venice. It was widely copied precisely because of its quality (it has the "twentieth" reading, of course) and closeness to the original; and subsequent versions (like Benedikt Niese's) have equally been based on thorough scholarship and study of the original manuscripts, and confirm the reading.
My point is that Beyer's work is still being quoted, and used to justify such nonsense as that "a printer typesetting of the manuscript Antiquities messed up in the year 1544. According to scholars, every single Josephus manuscript in these libraries dating from before 1544 supports the inference that Herod died in 1 BC". It would be useful to have a clear, short response available based on the facts. I understood that ErrancyWiki was for that purpose, "a much shorter summary" for easier reading.
You don't really get the whole "Wiki" concept, do you? If you are going to have a site that looks like Wikipedia, then you ought to run it like Wikipedia, or else have a clear notice that says, "This is not Wikipedia, and if we don't like what you write, we will simply blank it out. And we will decide when the topic is finalized, and close it for editing." If you want to keep control, give it a different look, and only allow invited people to contribute.

Zozimus 16:24, 14 Jan 2007 (CST)


2nd Response To Zozimus

JW:

Since we agree that Beyer provides very little evidential support for a defense I lack the motivation to put much emotion into my response here. I find your "Carrier does not seem to notice how inept Beyer or his supporters are" strange since that is exactly what Carrier notices. I haven't looked in detail at your detail criticism of Beyer but it is very welcome here.

Regarding the purpose of ErrancyWiki I think you have a misunderstanding here. This Legends article was written 100% by Richard Carrier. It's only been open to public linking and improvements in formatting and the content is not intended to be Edited. Your "if we don't like what you write, we will simply blank it out" comment is also strange as I don't remember ever erasing anything here. I have started to downgrade "arguments" I consider deficient from Con to Neutral or even Talk. When I do so I try to explain why they are deficient and what can be done to cure them. This may seem like Censorship to those on the other side but even Wikipedia has Administrators that Edit, doesn't it (rhetorical, you don't need to answer).

If you care so much about ErrancyWiki how about posting in a non-Legends (every other one) article?

--JoeWallack 17:28, 14 Jan 2007 (CST)

British Soccer Fan Feedback

"How absolutely bloody ridiculous. How can something come labelled "by Richard Carrier 2006" when it's open for anyone to edit and might have been chopped around to say something completely different from what Carrier originally said, for all the reader knows?"


This is how. Hey, there's a new invention someone should tell you about. It's called "Administrators!"

--JoeWallack 19:05, 12 Aug 2006 (CDT)


Formatting

Concerning the formatting of the article, is there any particular reason that standard formatiing (using sections and subsections) isn't used? Using standard formatting would (1) give a TOC, and (2) make navigation easier. And, in particular, it would make linking from Luke 2:2 easier. --FreezBee 06:46, 20 Jun 2006 (CDT)


Laziness. You are welcome to do it. Why do you think they call you FreeBee?

--JoeWallack 08:06, 20 Jun 2006 (CDT)


FreezBee, I give up on trying to figure out how to create a TOC:

1) There appear to be no relevant instructions.

2) The only heading choice above is level two headline.

3) When I imitate the text for Pages with TOC no TOC is created.

Can you list instructions here on how to create a TOC step by step? Thanks.

--JoeWallack 10:02, 20 Jun 2006 (CDT)


Appears as if you have solved the problem yourself :-) Anyway, a TOC is automatically added, if there are at least three sections in the article. --FreezBee 07:30, 23 Jun 2006 (CDT)


Intro needed

I'm assuming that "Legends" is supposed to be a page that periodically highlights an article about errancy in the Bible. It would be good to have details about this in the page introduction. Also, I would recommend making the [http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Legends&rcid=41896 Legends Page] link on the homepage an internal link, like [[Legends|Legends Page]]. --J. J. 11:10, 8 Aug 2006 (CDT)