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This is a reminder that NINT 2025 on the historical Jesus starts this evening. I ve been given the opportunity to see some of the speakers in the 2025 lineup in action in the previous NINT 2024 conference. Hopefully this provides some insight if you ve been thinking about attending. The presentations are lecture-style in a good [...]
Did you know? The website at earlychristianwritings.com has been online since 2001. I was only 20 years old when I put the website online. That s right, not even old enough to get a drink! The layout was designed by my brother-in-law Andy. It hasn t been touched in over twenty years. WordPress didn t exist. Every single [...]
Of all the techniques that could be used to study ancient texts, there are a few that stand out as being both very important and largely understudied, being either ignored in practice or taken on faith due to the lack of relevant expertise or accessible tools. The ones that come to my mind right now [...]
While not nearly as much ink has been spilled over the reference to John the Baptist found in Antiquities 18.116-119 (Whiston s chapter 18.5.2), when compared to the case of the Testimonium to Jesus, there is still a debate to be found in the literature over the authenticity of the reference to John the Baptist in [...]
In a previous post on The Quotable Josephus, we ve seen that Josephus was frequently used as a source for quotation (including quotation by way of Eusebius, who himself quotes the Jewish historian). In a post on Eusebius, Rufinus, and the Latin Antiquities, we saw (in agreement with Whealey and Levenson-Martin) that the Latin translation of the Antiquities created under the [...]
In their article on The Latin Translations of Josephus on Jesus, John the Baptist, and James (Journal for the Study of Judaism 45, pp. 1-79), Levenson and Martin discuss the fact that four passages quoted from Josephus by Eusebius in the Latin translation of Rufinus appear with very similar wording in the Latin translation of the [...]
The works of Josephus did not survive only in complete editions of his books. Between the fact that Josephus was (and remains) eminently quotable, particularly for his relevance to the times of the New Testament, and the fact that his works were voluminous, there was often occasion for excerpts to be made from his texts. [...]
The study of the texts of Josephus, even in connection to the hotly contested and famous passages found there, is not all wrangling. There is, it will be admitted, a slight amount of mystery as to whether a reference to Jesus originally formed part of the Latin table of contents (falling out of transmission here [...]
The question of the origin of the table of contents and related practices in antiquity (when they began to be used, how they entered the manuscript tradition, and whether they are authorial or not in any particular case) is an involved one. There is an excellent paper by Roger Pearse providing some notes on the subject. On [...]
The translation in the Loeb edition of Josephus Antiquities 18.112 reads: On his return after transacting his business in Rome, his wife, who had got wind of his compact with Herodias, before any information reached him that she had discovered everything, asked him to send her away to Machaerus, which was on the boundary between the territory of Aretas and that of [...]