Richard Carrier (PhD)
Since the Flavians had destroyed the militarized messianic movement, they would not have needed to develop a pacified Judaism.
“The Jewish War was effectively over in just four years (any siege war was expected to take at least three, and Vespasian was actually busy conquering Rome in the fourth year of that War). So why would they think they needed any other solution?”
Joe Atwill, Author of Caesar’s Messiah [a book to which I gave a 2-star reader rating]
Carrier (PhD) commits the common blunder of assuming that the Flavians’ war of 66-73 had destroyed the Jews’ messianic rebellion. In fact, Josephus concluded the Wars of the Jews by describing a messianic rebellion that broke out in Cyrene after the fall of Masada.
Question for Judgment: Did the destruction of the militarized messianic movement in the First Jewish-Roman War dismiss the need to develop a pacified Judaism?
Steefen
My short answer is no, it did not. The First Jewish-Roman War was followed by two more rebellions against Rome.
The question is put to you.
Your Answer: ___________________________________
Richard Carrier (PhD)
Atwill struggles against all contemporary scholarship to insist that Gadara was the original reading in the Gospels … when in fact it almost certainly was not. … it’s one of the most telling examples of Atwill’s incompetence at a study like this…
Gadara was a mistranslation of another town, ‘Gergesa’. This town, which was on the Sea of Galilee, had to have been the site of Jesus’s exorcism of the demoniac because Gadara was “more than a days” walk from the Sea of Galilee.
Joe Atwill
This is the first of the many factual errors in Carrier’s (PhD) analysis. Six miles can be walked in under two hours. Pursued by Roman soldiers, any member of a high school cross-country team could travel the distance in under 40 minutes.
Carrier (PhD) attempted to use Origen’s comments on the textual confusion over the location of the swine miracle as a way to block my interpretation in its tracks. But Origen’s comments are inconclusive on their face in that he does not define what the ‘country’ of the Gadarenes means nor does he have any understanding of what the original text said. Origen wrote:
“But in a few copies we have found, “into the country of the Gadarenes;” and, on this reading, it is to be stated that Gadara is a town of Judaea, in the neighborhood of which are the well-known hot springs, and that there is no lake there with overhanging banks, nor any sea. But Gergesa, from which the name Gergesenes is taken, is an old town in the neighborhood of the lake now called Tiberias, and on the edge of it there is a steep place abutting on the lake, from which it is pointed out that the swine were cast down by the demons.” (Commentary on John Book VI, 24)
Richard Carrier (PhD)
“You mean Gergesa (aka “Gerasa”). Gadara is a textual corruption. Earlier manuscripts of Matthew had Gerasa or Gergesa (variants of the same coastal-town’s name), not Gadara, as was already known by the time of Origen (early 3rd century) if not before, and has since been confirmed through manuscript textual analysis, and [this] is why Luke and Mark both correctly identify the town as Gerasa, not Gadara, while the geography of all three accounts obviously requires the town to be Gergesa, not Gadara–the latter being nowhere near the water (rather, more than a day’s walk from it)…the textual analysis of the manuscript tradition that we can reconstruct from texts all across the Mediterranean confirms that the Gadara reading must have arisen later in the tradition than either Gerasa or Gergesa…Origen also discusses a very different city called Gerasa, but we now know that Gerasa is a possible transliteration of Gergesa from local dialects into Greek, and so the original text could have had either, referring to what Origen identifies as Gergesa). That all the earliest mss. that survive of Mark, Matthew, and Luke have Gerasa or Gergesa, not Gadara, confirms this (including an actual papyrus from Luke dated to the very time of Origen)”
Joe Atwill
Carrier’s (PhD) claim that “all the earliest mss of Mark, Matthew and Luke have Gerasa or Gergesa not Gadara” is incorrect.
All of the four great ancient uncial codices record Gadara. In Matthew’s gospel the location is Gadarenes in Vaticanus. In Mark’s account, Vaticanus has “Gerasenes” but Alexandrinus and Ephraemi have “Gadarenes”. Whereas in Luke’s account, Alexandrinus has “Gadarenes” and Sinaiticus has “Gergesenes”. All that can be determined from Origen and the earliest manuscripts is that by the fourth century no one was certain as to what the original text had read.
Carrier (PhD) eventually gave up on trying to use Origen as proving unequivocally that Gadara could not have been the site of Jesus’s swine miracle, but moved into an argument based upon the area’s geography. In other words, Carrier created a theory that Gadara was totally landlocked and therefore could not have been the place from which the demonized rushed into the sea.
Richard Carrier (PhD)
“Regardless of what Origen said, we now can determine ourselves from extant mss. [= manuscripts] that Gadara is the corruption (check any textual apparatus for the NT to see why). Origen was aware of there being a corruption, but lacked the data we now have, so he resolved it by appeal to his personal knowledge of geography (and the symbolic employment of the location by the Gospel author)–and his reasoning is entirely correct: Gadara is geographically impossible, whereas Gergesa is clearly the intended location.”
Joe Atwill
A tale that describes someone with talking demons inside of them and possessed pigs is not a literal history.
Steefen
LOL. Am I supposed to stay in my chair? Am I not to fall on the floor laughing?
Joe Atwill
Carrier nevertheless tries to apply reality-based criticism to a story that is either a fable or broadly symbolic and so loses the thread completely.
Richard Carrier (PhD)
“Neither Gadara nor Gerasa lies on the shore of the Galilean lake in any position from which a herd of pigs could rush down a bank into the water. Gadara stands about 5 miles from the sea of Galilee, Gerasa even further (more than thirty miles away).”
Joe Atwill (thinking)
How do you know the capacities of demonized pigs?
Steefen
Screaming LOL. ROFL.
Steefen (thinking)
Come on. Pull it back together.
Joe Atwill
None of the synoptic evangelists suggest that the encounter with the demoniac occurred at Gadara proper, but only in the country (χωραν) of the Gadarenes. In other words that Carrier’s (PhD) absolute certainty of the requirement for Gergesa was absurd as there is no way to know how far such a region went.
I wrote (quoting Bruce Metzger):
“Moreover, ‘Gadara’ is defined by Josephus as possessing territory ‘which lay on the frontiers of the Sea of Galilee’ (Life ix, 42).”
Carrier (PhD) realized that his ‘Landlocked Gadara Theory’ was kaput if the city held a territory with villages down to the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee.
BDEhrman
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