Diogenes said:
Did you even read the presentation?
Yes.
Diogenes said:
Do you have anything that refutes it point by point? Or even a few of the points?
It is an argument from absence propped up by ad hominem. There is little to refute. So, for example, in addressing the archaeology of the region, he makes snide reference to
"Catholic archaeologists",
"Christian Hero No 1",
"Christian Hero No 2" while noting thet
"In truth, the scanty evidence is consistent with the site being used as a single family farm over many centuries – and a single family farm does not make a village."But his proclamation of truth conveniently omits any scholarly argument whatsoever. Nor are we told anything about Mr. Humphreys' experience in archaeology. Surely if these
Christian Heros are to be held suspect because of their religious beliefs, we have every right to question unsubstantiated assertions from someone with no apparent expertise, but with a very apparent agenda.
Nor is Mr. Humphreys beyond a little linguistic sleight-of-hand. In a sidebar, he cleverly writes:
"Josephus mentions 45 cities and villages of Galilee – yet Nazareth not at all." The clear suggestion is that Josephus identifies these villages, but omits Narareth from the list. This is simply not the case. As can be seen below, Josephus speaks of
many villages about" Sepphoris, but nowhere provides anything suggestive of an exhaustive list of the names of these villages. The sidebar is simply disingenuous.
Note, by the way, that there is no reference to specific Jesephus text - another example of the type of scholarship you so readily embrace.
A further example of disingenuous argumentation is to be found in his discussion of the Caesarea inscription. He first quotes Crossan:
"The eighteenth priestly course [called] Hapizzez, [resettled at] Nasareth." and then clarifies
"A few Jewish priests and their families made up a small settlement in the southeast of the valley until the 4th century."
By what alchemy did the
"eighteenth priestly course" become no more than
"A few Jewish priests"? Certainly this
'scholarly' work of yours provides not a hint, much less anything approaching evidence. Let's see if we can do any better.
The Encyclopaedia Judaica writes:
"When Antiochus III granted rights to Jerusalem he freed the priests from a series of taxes. Hecataeus estimated their number in his time at 1,500 but it is possible that he was only referring to Jerusalem, since many of them were settled in the country towns and villages of Judea and southern Samaria and only went up to Jerusalem in accordance with their duty in the system of priestly watches." If we accept 1500 as a total, and assume it to be divided into 24 equal watches or courses, we get a priestly contingent of roughly 62 families
"[resettled at] Nasareth." Since it is unlikely that one would have a village populated entirely, or even predominantly, by priests, Mr. Humphreys'
"a few Jewish priests" suddenly becomes a village which could reasonably be presumed to contain a couple hundred families, and perhaps much more.
Did it? I haven't a clue, and neither does Mr. Humphreys. The sole difference is that he pretends otherwise while, again, offering nothing in the way of evidence. And, again, this is the type of agenda-driven apologetics that you admire as scholarship.
Diogenes said:
Why no Old Testament documentation of ' Nazareth ' ? Why no mention of a town named Nazareth outside of the Gospels ?
A stunning argument. Shall we likewise study, e.g.,
the Federalist Papers and de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America, and declare fictive all towns not referenced in one of those works?
At the same time, given ...
To be sure, the greatest cities of Galilee, O Justus! were Sepphoris, and thy country Tiberias. But Sepphoris, situated in the very midst of Galilee,
and having many villages about it, and able with ease to have been bold and troublesome to the Romans, if they had so pleased, yet did it resolve to continue faithful to those their masters, ...
- see below, also
Josephus
... shall we also consider references to these villages some clever Christian redaction?
Diogenes said:
Is it always ' confirmation bias run amok ', when you find yourself lacking in rebuttal material ?
That was an inane question. That you apparently consider the site an example of scholarship speaks volumes.
Certainly, I can do no better than Kirby's summary ...
J.D. Crossan comments on the inscription mentioning Nazareth (_The Historical Jesus_, p. 15):
"The very first mention of Nazareth in any non-Christian text comes from a fragmented inscription on a piece of dark gray marble excavated at Caesarea in August of 1962 and dating from the third or fourth century of the common era. In 70 C.E., during the First Roman-Jewish War, the Temple of Jerusalem was totally destroyed by the future emperor Titus, and, at the end of the Third Roman-Jewish War in 135 C.E., the defeated Jews were expelled from the territory of Jerusalem, renamed Aelia Capitolina by the emperor Hadrian.
The surviving priests, divided from ancient times into twenty-four courses that took weekly turns in Temple service, were eventually reorganized and resettled in various Galilean towns and villages. A list of those assignments was affixed to the wall of Caesarea's synagoge built around the year 300 C.E. The restored line reads: 'The eighteenth priestly course [called] Hapizzez, [resettled at] Nazareth.' Both communal relocation and synagogal inscription served, no doubt, both to recall the Second Temple's past and to await a Third Temple's future (Vardaman; Avi-Yonah)."
So this inscription comes from the third or fourth century and purports to record the existence of this village in the mid second century.
Personally, I have no qualms with the existence of a village called Nazareth in the first century. The two sources which are usually called upon to cast doubt on Nazareth are Josephus, who names fourty-five towns in Galilee, and the Talmud, which names sixty-three Galilean towns. The latter can be dismissed because the Talmud is roughly contemporaneous with this inscription and thus only shows that Nazareth existed without necessarily having to be included in a list of towns. Josephus most likely did not mention Nazareth because it was merely one of a few satellites to the major city of Sepphoris, three or four miles away.
Josephus speaks of Sepphoris as "situated in the heart of Galilee, surrounded by numerous villages" (Life 346), and Nazareth would be among those unnamed villages.
Archaeological digs indicate that the site of Nazareth, although occupied from quite ancient times, seems to have been refounded in the second century BCE (ibid., pp. 15-16). It is at from this period forward that the most extensive remains are found. Crossan suggests that the refounding of Nazareth may be connected to the annexation of Galilee at approximately the same time by the Hasmoneans.
It is sensible enough to assume that the name of the village would have remained constant unless there was some kind of major upheaval after its refounding, of which there is no indication.
Finally, even if the Gospels are regarded as utter fiction, it is not daring to suggest that the mention of Nazareth in them provides a modicum of evidence for the existence of a first century village in Galilee of the same name. The writer of Mark does evince at least minimal knowledge of the geography of Galilee. Even if we suppose that the author hit upon the name of Nazareth as a punning reference to the word for branch or some other linguistic legerdemain, it is entirely plausible that the author had heard of a village called Nazareth and that this informed the writing of his fiction. This would further explain why this is not corrected by the authors of Matthew, Luke, or John.
It is just easier to suppose that the silly village of the name had historical reality -- at the very least, I do not believe that this is a very good reason to cast aspersions on the texts.
- see
Peter Kirby on Nazareth [
emphasis added - RD]
None of this is to suggest that the historicity of a 1st century CE Nazareth has been conclusively proven. But to suggest that there is a consensus to the contrary is simply wrong, and to point to Humphreys as the exemplar of some such scholarly consensus is ludicrous. If someone came to you with comparable argumentation in support of Noah's Ark or the Exodus/Conquest you would laugh in his face. That you choose here to applaud rather than laugh is not skepticism but, as previously noted, naked confirmation bias.
