Category: Historical Methods and Historiography

A broad church. Initially included Historiography in the name. Is “History” too broad and potentially misleading? This category includes discussions of research methods by historians as well as philosophical discussions about both the nature of history and the nature of the writing of history. Includes the problematic methods of biblical scholars. Or should the latter be moved to Biblical Studies as incompatible with the former? (Compare the difference between astronomy and astrology.) Does not include the methods of research and narrating history by ancient authors. See under Ancient Literature.

2026-06-09

Two (more) Recommended Readings for Richard Carrier

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Rene Salm has posted responses to Nazareth-related arguments in Ken Dark’s last three publications. Richard Carrier relies heavily on Ken Dark for the site of first century Nazareth and has recommended others read Dark’s work carefully. My first recommended reading for Carrier is Salm’s detailed analysis of Dark’s claims.

Compare the difference:

Carrier’s response to Dark‘s argument that the “large” stone before the tomb is evidence of a date before 100 CE

Salm’s response (pages 18-20) to the same point by Dark

Reference:
Smaller rolling stone diameter size: 0.8–1.0 m. (2.6–3.3 ft.)
Average rolling stone diameter size: 1.0–1.2 m. (3.3–4.0 ft.)
Larger rolling stone diameter size: 1.2–1.8 m. (4–6 ft.)

Similarly, critics might “skip over” the fact that Dark makes a distinction between “large” (far more expensive) rollstones (which are all pre-100) and small ones (which were abundant in later periods but nowhere found at Nazareth). Indeed, the tomb in question may have been cut for one of the priests resettled there after the first war.

And again, statistically, to have such a tomb there entails decades, probably at least a generation (about half a century), of prior town flourishing. So even if against the odds this was the last such tomb built, in exactly the year 100, that still makes it more likely than not that Nazareth had been there since at least 50 AD.

And once you are admitting Nazareth predates the War, insisting it only “just” got established “right” after Jesus is supposed to have lived there is playing a high-wire act of coincidences—and on no evidence, just a desire for the result. It can’t be argued that there is no evidence of Herodian occupation “except” for all the evidence of Herodian occupation, simply because you “desire” all that evidence to be post-Herodian.

We turn to another invention of Prof. Dark: that the rolling stone at the SoN [Sisters of Nazareth] convent site is of the “large” variety. In fact, the stone is 1.09 m (3.6 ft.) in diameter (Dark 2021:121). Despite the imposing impression given by photographs in general circulation (Illus. 3 above), this diameter is typical and places it in the “intermediate” category.

However, Dark describes the rolling stone at the SoN site as “large” and then uses that false characterization to date it before 100 CE:

(11a) Although smaller rolling stones continued in use into the Byzantine period, stones of the size attested here [i.e. at the SoN convent site] were no longer used after c. AD 100… (Dark 2021:121)

(11b) A key chronological indicator is the use of a large rolling stone (0.8 m or over in diameter) to seal the entrance of the tomb [at the SoN site]. (Dark 2021:121)

Dark’s confusion regarding rolling stone sizes is underlined by the foregoing citation 12b, in which he considers that a rolling stone of diameter 0.8 m (2.6 ft.) is “large.” It is no typo, for he confirms the error in the following passage:

(12) In Galilee, where they apparently have no associations with tombs of exceptional status at all, tombs sealed by large (0.8 m or over) circular rolling stones seem to have been especially common. (Dark 2020:97)

However, an 0.8 m diameter stone is at the small end of the rolling stone scale. Virtually all rolling stones (and round leaning stones — see below) were larger than 0.8 m in diameter! Yet with this error Dark dates the Nazareth rolling stone (and thus the associated SoN tomb complex) to I CE:

(13) Hachlili (2005) and Kloner and Zissu (2007) also agree that although rolling stones were used after c. AD 100, the stones were much smaller than those before that date. Consequently, a tomb sealed by a rolling stone of c. 0.8 m or more in diameter can confidently be assigned to between the late first BC and the late first century AD, and probably more specifically to the mid- to late first century AD. (Dark 2020:97)

This is another case of misrepresentation, for Hachlili, as well as Kloner and Zissu, wrote nothing of tomb blocking stones in II CE and beyond — both of the cited books deal specifically with Second Temple–period tombs (2nd c. BCE–1st c. CE).

In my opinion, it is probable that Dark did not properly understand a certain passage in Kloner’s 1999 BAR article (below). Indeed, I too misunderstood the passage on first reading it, for Kloner makes a fine distinction (one that only a tomb specialist would make) between a “round blocking stone” and a “rolling stone.” In fact, Kloner avoids the designation “rolling stone,” even at the risk of rendering his English (which is not his native language) quite cumbersome. For him, the “blocking stone” that closed a tomb could come in a variety of forms — some unknown to the average lay reader. In the first instance, the blocking stone could be square (the vast majority) or round in shape. In the second instance (and this is what escaped me at first, and what escapes most readers — including Dark) is that the round blocking stone could (a) “lean against the rock facade” (BAR p. 28) or (b) be “set on one end between two parallel walls and thus moved on a sort of track” so that they “could easily be rolled away” (p. 25). It is the latter that we casually call “rolling stone,” but we must bear in mind that all round blocking stones are not automatically “rolling stones.” There also existed the category of round blocking stones that simply leaned against the entrance to the tomb. These “leaning stones,” if you will, came to preponderate in Late Roman and Byzantine times — and they were much smaller than the earlier round stone that rolled away (what we call the “rolling stone”). A leaning stone was a smaller round stone simply propped against the tomb entrance, without a carved track. The critical takeaway from this abstruse discussion on tomb blocking stones is this: when Kloner writes of “later round stones” that “were much smaller” (in the citation below) he is not writing about rolling stones at all — he is writing about round “leaning stones,” which constitute an entirely different mechanism of tomb closure than the stone that rolls away.

Furthermore, the leaning stone (as I call it for simplicity) does not require a hewn recess into which it is rolled. Nor does it require the thickness of a stone that, while being rolled, must stay upright — lest it fall over. For these reasons leaning stones were much smaller and lighter than “rolling stones.” They were generally less than 0.9 m (3 ft.) in diameter — small enough for one or two people to move (or roll) aside — while not requiring either a hewn track or a hewn recess to one side.

With the foregoing discussion in mind, here is Kloner’s description of later “leaning stones” (not to be confused with “rolling stones”):

(14) So far we have been talking about blocking stones from the Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. In later periods the situation changed, and round blocking stones [read: “leaning stones”] became much more common. Dozens of them have been found from the late Roman to Byzantine periods (second to seventh century C.E.). These later round stones were much smaller than the Second Temple period stones (less than 3 feet in diameter), and they did not move on a track but simply leaned against the rock facade, making them even simpler to move. (A. Kloner, BAR 1999.5:25, 28.)

I suspect that Dark read the foregoing passage and simply assumed that “rolling stones” diminished in size after ca. 100 CE. That conclusion is, after all, what he writes (above, citations 10, 11, 13). However, what actually happened was that the preferred mechanism of closure changed from a round rolling stone to a round leaning stone, with the concomitant reduction of stone weight. Nevertheless, a few rolling stones of the larger variety continued to be used after 70 CE — including the one at the SoN site at Nazareth.¹⁶

Unfortunately, the foregoing nuances have apparently escaped Dark. He proposes a change in rolling stone size ca. 100 CE and calls a small rolling stone of 0.8 m “large.” Heaping error upon error, he then dates the tombs at the SoN convent site before 100 CE, simply because Tomb 1 was closed by a rolling stone of very average size. On the basis of these several errors, the archaeologist then proposes that the (alleged) dwelling predated the tombs and thus the alleged dwelling must date to early I CE. This entirely wayward concatenation is, however, only in Dark’s mind. Armed as he is with a fertile imagination, neither the physical evidence at the SoN site, nor tomb typology, nor the published scholarly literature prevent him from reaching one overriding goal: the discovery of a dwelling at the SoN site “in the time of Jesus.”

16 Excavated and published sites include (a) Khirbet Midras (Judean Shephelah), Bar Kochba period, rolling stone diameter ~1.5 m; (b) Horvat ‘Ethri (Judean Hills), Bar Kochba period, rolling stone diameter ~1.4 m; (c) Khirbet Shema (Upper Galilee), II–III CE, rolling stone diameter ~1.45 m. In comparison, the rolling stone at the SoN site is 1.09 m in diameter.

Carrier speaks of lazy/lazily and apologetic dating and presents himself as the “PhD brain” against the “amateur” Salm. I suggest the above comparison shows Carrier as the lazy reader and it is Salm who is the genuine scholar with his genuinely critical reading. Read the full response by Salm for a full appreciation of the apologetics and confusion throughout Dark’s attempts to establish an early first century Nazareth.

Moving on to another reading recommendation for Richard.

In my previous post I offered a series of works arguing that Jerusalem was not an “uninhabited ruin” from 70 CE to 132 CE in the sense that it had no practical place in the religious life of the Jews. Evidence tells us that it continued to be visited by Jews (or Judeans) in their regular pilgrimages and even informal sacrifices were offered there. There were hopes that the temple would be rebuilt.

In the same post RC makes his point about Jerusalem being “by law” an “uninhabited ruin” suggesting it was bereft of any cultic relevance. Two sentences later he cites Matthew Grey’s dissertation:

The debate is discussed in Matthew Grey’s 2011 dissertation for UNC Chapel Hill (“Jewish Priests and the Social History of Post-70 Palestine”).

So this is my next recommended reading for Richard. (He evidently did not critically read it himself when he made his point in the same paragraph about the condition of post 70 CE Jerusalem.)

Grey, Matthew J. “Jewish Priests and the Social History of Post-70 Palestine.” Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011.

The city was occupied by the 10th legion. Yet priests continued to live nearby, hoping for a new temple, and as we have seen, still able to offer personal sacrifices at the temple site, still partaking in festival pilgrimages to the city.

Families of the priestly aristocracy also seem to have settled in northern Judea and just outside of Jerusalem, likely to await the rebuilding of the temple. . . . It appears that many Jews of the post-70 generation fully expected that the Romans would rebuild the temple in their lifetime. (p. 156)

Note Grey’s added detail:

Some scholars have even suggested that aspects of the sacrificial cult continued in Jerusalem in the period between the revolts. Kenneth W. Clark, “Worship in the Jerusalem Temple after A.D. 70,” NTS 6 (1959-1960): 269-280 made the following observations:

1) No sources explicitly declare the cessation of a sacrificial cult in 70.

2) The exilic and post-exilic Jews maintained a sacrificial cult for some time before the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple in the fifth century B.C.E.

3) The Romans issued no decree prohibiting worship at the temple site until 135.

4) Hints exist in the literature of some ongoing pilgrimage activity for several years after 70.

These are intriguing arguments. However, Clark‟s lack of conclusive evidence has left many scholars skeptical of the continuation of cultic sacrifices in Jerusalem between 70 and 135. See Barclay, Apion, 279 n.769. Cohen, Three Crowns, 160 points out that if there was some form of post-70 sacrificial cult, priests undoubtedly would have retained much of their involvement in it and still would have been seen as being able to facilitate contact with the divine. (p. 156)

One can see extracts of Clark’s article along with more details of more recent publications arguing the same point in the previous post. Note that Grey appears to be more open to the argument for an ongoing, though subdued, active Jewish cultic engagement with Jerusalem than Carrier would want to admit.

But I was curious after reading Grey’s remark that “many scholars” are sceptical so I consulted his two supporting references.

The first support, Barclay, is as follows:

Pace Clark 1959-60, there is no firm evidence that the temple sacrifices continued after 70 CE in a reduced form (see Smallwood 1981: 347-48): the Romans would hardly shut down the relatively harmless temple in Leontopolis (War 7.420-21) but allow the symbolic focus of the Revolt in Jerusalem to remain (on their policy, see Rives 2005). So Josephus is writing at a time when there is no temple of the one God.

Barclay appears to have misread Clark. Clark does not argue that there was a standing temple where sacrifices were offered. He says nothing more than that private persons offered their own sacrifices at the site of the temple. There was no national cult or national sacrifice, of course. Barclay is also pitting what he imagines would have been in the minds of the Romans with respect to those sacrifices against the evidence cited in the previous post. As for Barclay’s appeal to Smallwood, again see the previous post where I have quoted Smallwood’s words.

But the second reference was most interesting. Here is what Cohen writes in The Three Crowns, page 160 (my bolding etc):

Whether – and if so, for how long some Jews continued to offer sacrifices on the Temple mount after 70 C.E. has long been debated. That many continued to observe the custom of three annual pilgrimages to the site seems beyond doubt.³⁹

I will take his word for it that sacrifices at the temple post 70 has “long been debated”, but from what I have seen so far there is more incredulous disbelief (and mind-reading) on the side of the doubters than any engagement with the evidence that has been cited to argue the “for” side of the case. But by no means does Cohen represent post 70 Jerusalem as a place lost from all relevance to Jews: Jews continued visiting and engaging in cultic practices related to the city and held fast to hopes for its Temple’s restoration.

Just as the Temple was destroyed, Israel did not cease from making pilgrimage three times a year. (382) . . . Indeed, they go up to Jerusalem, but with melancholy and gloom. . . A Roman citizen used to go up and visit Jerusalem every year. . . then before us is testimony concerning a merchant from the Galilee who had the means to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem from time to time. (383) . . . . The earliest accounts of sages going up to visit Jerusalem are already from the generation of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai . . . “Once Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai was leaving Jerusalem, and Rabbi Joshua was walking behind him and saw the Temple destroyed. Rabbi Joshua said: Woe to us that this is destroyed!” From the next generation, the tradition is known about the visit of the head of the Sanhedrin. . . they were going up to Jerusalem. When they reached the watchtowers, they tore their garments. When they reached the Temple Mount and saw a fox emerging from the Holy of Holies, they began to weep. (385) . . . . From the sources we have brought, not only did they visit, but they also entered the Temple Mount. (391) . . . . Pilgrimage to Jerusalem after the destruction was accompanied by a number of legal regulations. As we have seen, one who saw the destruction of Israel was obligated to rend his garments. (384) . . . . There is no doubt that pilgrims came not only from the circles of the sages and their disciples, but from much broader circles, as emerges from the general descriptions we have brought and even from some of the detailed testimonies we will bring below. (385) . . . . From all the numerous testimonies we have brought, it follows that they made pilgrimages on the three pilgrimage festivals and on all the days of the year. No Jewish source connects specifically to the day of the Temple’s destruction. These testimonies cast doubt upon the testimonies of the Church Fathers and its writers that the Jews were permitted to visit Jerusalem only once a year on the Ninth of Av.⁸⁶(393)

86. The first to mention this custom is the Bordeaux Pilgrim in his itinerary (*Itinerarium Burdigalense*, ed. Geyer, p. 12, written around 333). See also Jerome’s commentary on Zephaniah 1:15 (*In Sophoniam P.L.*, ed. Migne, t. 22, col. 1355) and the words of Gregory of Nazianzus (*Orat. V 4 P.G.*, t. 35, col. 668).

Extracts from the footnote 39 are found in the side box here.

The text is by S. Safrai, translated from Hebrew: —>

Safrai, Shmuel. “Pilgrimage to Jerusalem after the Destruction of the Second Temple.” In Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period Memorial Volume for Abraham Schalit, edited by Aharōn Oppenheimer, Uriel Rappaport, and Menaḥēm Šṭern. Jād Jiṣḥāq Ben-Ṣeḇī, 1981. — That’s a translation. The original citation = S. Safrai, ‘Ha-‘Aliyah la-Regel Lirushalayim la-‘Ahar Hurban Bayit Sheini’, Peraqim be-Toledot Yerushalayim Bimei Bayit Sheini (eds. A. Oppenheimer, et al.; Jerusalem, 1981), pp.376-93.

All of this means that the ideal of Jerusalem as a centre of worship and hopes for a rebuilt temple were still alive in the minds of Judeans in the time of Hadrian. Physical practices sustained these hopes. Other works (I hope to discuss at least one major one soon) point to the actual place — the site of the Holy of Holies in the old Temple — where Hadrian set up his statue. That was the Abomination of Desolation of which the synoptic gospels speak. Hadrian was not doing something that had by his time lost any relevance for the Judeans.

Reading Grey’s thesis, critically, is a good place to start one’s journey into other literature that witnesses to the ongoing practical, day to day relevance of Jerusalem and its temple centre as a cultic focus for Judeans right up to the Bar Kokhba revolt.

2026-04-18

Doing History Backwards — and Discovering Christian Origins (or not)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

The usual way of doing history is to start with the ancient sources and move forwards. So for Christian origins we might start with the canonical gospels, sift out what is not plausible (e.g. rising from the dead), massage a little what seems plausible for the times of the story setting (e.g. a would-be messiah was crucified by the Romans and hallucinations about a dead person reappearing), add the epistles of Paul and Book of Acts to tell us that preachers went out preaching the gospel to the world, and bingo! Christianity is born. Today we have the gospels and letters from within a generation of Jesus and his apostles and we can study them to work out how things started out to explain what we have today.

But here’s another way of doing history.

Start with what we think we know, what we’ve learned, about the Gospels and Epistles of Paul. Start with our common understanding that these were among the earliest documents of Christianity. Start with our knowledge that the gospels were competing (or complementary) accounts of the historical Jesus, mixed with a bit of mythical embellishment. Start also with our notion of the common knowledge that Paul wrote letters to his early churches.

Then work back.

Okay, we are clear about what our beliefs about the sources are. Now let’s work back and see what others thought about these gospels and letters. Why do we think the things we do about them? Did we inherit our views from earlier writers? What did those earlier writers say? We can leapfrog over generations and go back to late antiquity and learn that the Church Fathers definitely assured their readers that the four gospels were “true” accounts of Jesus; and that Paul’s letters, as we know them, were indeed written by a first century Paul.

Okay, but let’s keep moving back in time though our mental time-machine.

We read now that Church Fathers protested that there were many letters of Paul doing the rounds and that many of these were outright forgeries! We further learn that some sects had shortened forms of the letters and that the only true letters were the larger, more wordy texts.

We learn that there were many gospels doing the rounds. But only four of these were genuine.

Let’s keep working backwards:

Let’s say the year is 140 CE. Some figure in Rome is declaring that he has a gospel and ten letters by Paul. That one gospel is anti-Jewish and the letters reject the idea that the Jewish Scriptures are authoritative. At the same time opponents to this figure are saying they have other gospels that are pro-Jewish and more than ten letters of Paul, and that all the letters of Paul respect the Jewish Scriptures.

So we have claims and counterclaims about authentic and false gospels and epistles. How is anyone to decide which is which?

Keep rolling back in time:

Nothing. Blank.

So how do we get further back in time? We can, if we want, return to the first option above. We can begin with what we think we know about the gospels and the letters.

We re-read the gospels and see that their story is set in the mid first century CE. The letters have Paul’s name on them so obviously they are written by the same Paul we read about in Acts. Let’s re-start there. Our beliefs, the traditions, must have come from somewhere. They must have had some basis in fact, yes?

To get back further in time, then, we assume that what the second century texts wanted us to believe about the origins of Christianity were true. Instead of asking, Why did the authors of these texts we read about in the second century want us to believe the gospel narratives were true, we ask, So given that we know these gospel stories have some basis in truth…..

They might have been “true” just as some factions in the second century believed. That’s where our beliefs come from, after all. But …..

How can we tell?

Should we do history forwards? Or backwards? Should we first examine our inherited beliefs about the sources? What happens if we set apart our beliefs and re-frame them as hypotheses to be tested?

Indebted to Markus Vinzent for the notion of “doing history backwards”.

Vinzent, Markus. Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

2026-03-25

When Historians Use Bayes’ Theorem and When They Don’t

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Bayesian reasoning is already used explicitly in some historical sciences such as phylogeny (Felsenstein 2004, 288–306), archaeology (Buck et al. 1996), cosmology (Hobson 2010), and historical linguistics (Greenhill et al. 2020) to justify inferences of probable knowledge of history. In the historiography of the human past, Richard Carrier (2012, 2014) attempted to apply Bayesian reasoning to inferences from the texts of the New Testament. In the philosophy of the historical sciences, Elliott Sober (e.g. 1988), has applied Bayesian probability for understanding phylogenic reasoning, as Wallach (2018) applied for understanding inferences in archaeological science.

Most practicing historians undoubtedly have never heard of Bayes’ rule, know little about probability theory, and therefore have not considered whether or not they have been practicing Bayesian methods. Nevertheless, most historians usually follow Bayes’ rule tacitly, without being aware of it. The relation between the inferences historians make and Bayes’ rule is comparable to the relations between natural speakers of languages, who have not studied them, and the rules of grammar they usually follow tacitly, without being able to articulate them. If somebody violates the rules of grammar, other speakers would notice it, and could correct the mistake, without necessarily being able to articulate the grammatical rules they enforce. (Tucker 2025, 20)

Earlier, Tucker wrote of Bayes’ theorem being used to evaluate hypotheses:

The Bayesian model is still the best explanation of the actual practices of historians. When there is sufficient evidence to determine a particular common cause hypothesis, historians evaluate the prior probabilities of competing particular common cause hypotheses that characterize the common causes of a variational group differently, according to whether the hypotheses are coherent with established historiographic beliefs, the laws of nature, as well as internally coherent (Kosso, 1993, p. 5). (Tucker 2004, 120)

A hypothesis in history might propose an explanation for certain past events, or it might propose an estimate of the impact of certain persons or events in history. One can validly use Bayes to judge between competing hypotheses that seek to explain President Kennedy’s assassination, but one does not need Bayes to determine if there was a historical President Kennedy in the first place. There are much simpler ways to check that datum. One does not need Bayes to decide if everything we read in the Bible is true. Tucker also explained (in his review of Richard Carrier’s use of Bayes):

I do not think it is necessary to resort to heavy Bayesian artillery to demolish literalist soft targets. A more economical solution is to dismiss literalism on the grounds of misunderstanding the evidence. . . . It is more parsimonious to interpret the evidence as a metaphor. (Tucker 2016, 134)

Tucker continues by addressing the same confusion I have posted about elsewhere — Carrier’s confusion of hypotheses with the sources/data/evidence. Carrier approaches history the way positivists used to do in the olden days, approaching it like an empirical science that differs only from other sciences insofar as it has comparatively less data to work with. Again, Tucker:

Richard Carrier understands historiography as a historical science like “geology, cosmology, paleontology, criminal forensics” (105). Historical sciences use evidence to support hypotheses about historical events such as the Big Bang, the origins of the solar system, asteroids hitting the earth, the evolution and disappearance of species, and who committed a crime. Historical sciences rely more on observations than on experiments and infer particularities more than generalities. In Carrier’s view, science and the historical sciences are not identical but are continuous and mutually dependent with a quantitative difference: in his opinion, historiography has less data and so is less reliable. (Tucker 2016, 130)

Most historians learned long ago that history is not like a science at all, and would not be like a science even if it had mountains more data. No, it is better to simply treat Jesus as an unknown quantity, as a figure who is only attested in writings that are independently attested long after he was supposed to have lived, with most of those writings presenting him as a theological figure or a figure of second and third hand beliefs. There is no evidence at all for the historical Jesus of the kind we have, say, for the historical Alexander or Julius Caesar. We no more need Bayes to determine the existence of Julius Caesar or Alexander or the ancient city of Rome than we do to determine the historicity of President Kennedy, as mentioned above. In those cases we have information that can be determined to have originated in the life-times of those persons. Historical Jesus scholars have had to rely on hypotheses and trust in very late corroborated sources to argue that their information can be traced back to a historical Jesus. That is not the case with the likes of Alexander or Julius Caesar — or President Kennedy.

Tucker, Aviezer. 2025. Historiographic Reasoning. Cambridge University Press.
———2016. “The Reverend Bayes Vs. Jesus Christ,” History and Theory 55 (1): 129–40.
———2004. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge University Press

2026-01-07

Robert VIPPER (Wipper) – Works Translated into English

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Wipper_Robert_Yurievich — Robert Vipper 1859-1954

Here are two books by Robert Vipper translated into English.

The Emergence of Christian Literature — presents a case for the second century origin of the canonical New Testament literature.
Rome and Early Christianity — argues for the mid to late second century emergence of Christianity as we know it.

If you do not see the file within a few seconds of opening the page try refreshing your browser.

—o0o—

Vipper, Robert Iu. Vozniknovenie khristianskoi literatury
(Возникновение христианской литературы)
[The Emergence of Christian Literature]. Moscow: Nauka, 1946.

Download (PDF, 4.15MB)

Russian language file: Виппер – Возникновение христианской литературы

—o0o—

Vipper, Robert Iu. Rim i rannee khristianstvo
(Рим и раннее христианство) Vipper-Rome
[Rome and Early Christianity]. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1954.

correction: закреплен and закрепленo in the file (pages 27 and 137) = “secured”

Download (PDF, 4.6MB)

correction

: закреплен and закрепленo in the file (pages 27 and 137) = “secured”

Russian language file: Виппер Р.Ю. – Рим и раннее христианство -Roma e il Cristianesimo delle origini

—o0o—

2025-12-26

A Message to Richard Carrier. – And Difficulties with Pliny’s Letter about the Christians

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

A Message to Richard Carrier:

Hi Richard …. I hope we can press a re-set button and make a fresh start. Some years back you gave me good advice: you said that when we make mistakes the best thing we can do is admit them, correct them and move on. Earlier this year I was somewhat dismayed at your responses to my criticisms of aspects of your Bayesian approach to history — it was evident to me that you had not had time to read the full discussion and as a result failed to even acknowledge, let alone address, the arguments I was making.

Soon afterwards I sought from you some background to your criticisms of Enrico Tuccinardi’s stylometric analysis of Pliny’s letter about the Christians. I admit my questions were curt — my disillusionment from your responses to my earlier criticisms re Bayes still rankled — but you did not answer any of them and only responded with generalized personal imputations of bad motive and wrong reasoning.

Please let’s do a re-set. Though I have criticisms of your applications of Bayes in historical research I have never advocated a wholesale abandonment of Bayesian reasoning. If you ever read my past or future posts addressing my reservations of your approach, I trust you will read them with care, accepting they are written in good faith and that I seek a respectful and cordial and informed dialogue.

Similarly with respect to this post — about your criticisms of Tuccinardi’s study of Pliny’s letter 10.96. Again, I suspect you failed to do the careful reading required for a fuller understanding of his arguments. You are a busy man. But when it comes to writing publicly about other people’s works we owe it to them and to ourselves to be scrupulously careful to get things right. If we find we have made mistakes, we move on, determined not to repeat them in the future.

P.S.
You have been the target of many personal, even dishonest, criticisms from scholars and lay readers alike. So was Earl Doherty, whom we both highly respect. One of the reasons we admired him was his patience and civility in the face of those sorts of attacks. (In fact, some of my disagreements with you go back many years but because of the “attack Carrier” climate so prevalent on the web at the time I remained silent: I did not want anyone to think I was contributing to fanning personal denigration.)

–o0o–

To Everyone Else:

In July this year I posted a regret that I lacked time to post on certain topics then. Well, here is my catch up with one of those topics: Richard Carrier’s, Statistical Stylometrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Horrid (Part 2: Pliny and Galen).

Before I was able to post my own views of what Richard Carrier (RC) had written Enrico Tuccinardi (ET) posted his detailed response. So that makes it easier. I can conflate some of what I was hoping to say with his remarks. (In brief, ET argues that Pliny’s letter contains anomalies that make it unreliable as a historical source; RC insists that ET has incompetently compared Pliny’s letter with the wrong database and therefore his conclusions are invalid.)

Misreading other scholarship

In the following 10.96 refers to Pliny’s letter about the Christians to emperor Trajan — it was the 96th letter in the tenth book of his letters. Books 1 to 9 were more literary epistles written and later curated by Pliny with the intent of making them public. Questions remain about how and why Book 10 came to be published.

RC wrote critically that Pliny was known for his stylistic variation and that ET failed to sufficiently consider this fact:

The study on that that Hurtado is calling attention to is Federico Gamberini, Stylistic Theory and Practice in the Younger Pliny, which demonstrates Pliny is particularly known for large style variation across his letters.

That’s not quite what Gamberini wrote and here Hurtado is as much at fault as Carrier. Rather, Gamberini demonstrated “large style variation across” the first nine books of his letters. The tenth book, including 10.96, was monostylistic. Gamberini wrote that the group of letters to which #96 belongs illustrate

a low degree of differentiation, since most letters consist in reports or analyses of a given situation. (333f. Underlining original)

I’ll elaborate on this point in the following section.

Whose hand is waving?

RC continued:

And this is a problem Tuccinardi kind of handwaves off in a way a non-expert reading his study might miss. After reading it [presumably Gamberini’s analysis of Pliny’s style] myself . . . .

On the contrary, ET’s study and assumptions are entirely consistent with the literary analysis we read in Gamberini’s work. Carrier says he read Gamberini’s work — at least that’s how I interpret his words — but if so, then Carrier’s following description of Pliny’s letter contradicts at every point what Gamberini’s study makes explicitly clear (my bolding):

Pliny varies his style tremendously especially in respect to genre, which is why Tuccinardi says he only created an “aggregate profile” of book 10 of Pliny’s correspondence, which contains all his state correspondence (mainly with emperor Trajan). This is distinct from all his personal correspondence in books 1 through 9. . . . . letter 10.96 is more like the letters in Books 1–9, not less. So he is testing it against the wrong base text.

This is an immediate and enormous problem that single-handedly invalidates all of Tuccinardi’s results. Because letter 10.96 (I’ll call it Tuccinardi’s “disputed” letter) contains an unusual amount of personal thoughts and reflections compared to other letters in book 10. It therefore actually more resembles letters in books 1 through 9. Indeed, 10.96 deviates considerably from most of book 10 in being in a rhetorical style—most of the other letters there are in curt administrative Latin, with a comparative minimum of rhetoric or elaboration. They are, in effect, business letters designed to be as brief and to-the-point as possible. That couldn’t be more different than this letter which is unusually long, elaborate, rhetoric-laden, and on a very unusual subject—indeed, a unique one: Christianity . . . .

You’ll notice it is the only long letter in Book 10, and thus appears to be in a genre unlike most of that volume, and more like letters in the other volumes (e.g., just from the previous three volumes—I didn’t even check volumes 1 through 5 because 6 through 9 already show my point by themselves—compare: 6.2, 6.16, 6.20, 6.29, 6.31, 6.33; 7.6, 7.9, 7.17, 7.19, 7.24, 7.27, 7.33; 8.6, 8.14, 8.18, 8.20, 8.23 and 24; 9.13, 9.26, 9.33—none of which have anything comparable in volume 10 except 10.96).

No work required to check….

Just to comment on that last sentence first ….. Carrier is saying that he was driven to check for himself the earlier volumes of Pliny’s letters to compare their lengths and that he lacked time to compare them all. Again, this puzzled me because if he had read Gamberini he should have simply referred to Gamberin’s list setting out all the lengths of the letters in the first nine books (pp 151f), compared them with the length of the Pliny letter (54-55 lines by the same 1963 O.C.T. measure) and immediately identified a minimum of 34 letters of the same length and longer.

But length is not necessarily the same thing as style.

Carrier & Hurtado versus Gamberini

The more critical problem lies in Carrier’s claim and Hurtado’s inference that the “style” and “genre” of 10.96 more closely align with the letters of books 1 to 9. But any reading of Gamberini flatly contradicts that assessment.

Gamberini classifies 10.96 among 24 letters of the type “requests for advice” (336) and examines its style among the other letters:

10.96 contains a standardized ceremonial opening that is common to 31 other letters in book 10 and in common with 10 other “requests for advice” (341f, 347). These features are alien to the letters of books 1 to 9.
Gamberini further aligns 10.96 with a score of other book 10 letters containing “standardized expressions and formulas of deference” toward the emperor.
Unlike the letters of book 9, those of book 10, including 10.96, contain few if any instances of figures of speech — though 10.96 does contain one instance of the “stylistic” isocolon (357f).
Tropes are “extremely rare” in book 10 but Trajan’s letter of reply (10.97) contains one instance of imagery! (371)

In all, 10.96 is part of a book of very “boring” letters with respect to style and is nothing at all like “scintillating”(?) stylistic variants of books 1 to 9 — they all lack the “literary dimension”:

But fundamentally the letters of book 10 reveal to us, by the absence of the features common in books 1-9, the essence of the style of the curatius scriptae, consisting in the symmetry of paratactic sentences and brevity. The analysis of book 10 is a good ’’control” experiment (i.e. an experiment conducted ceteris paribus but with the omission of one factor, being in this case the literary dimension) confirming the results obtained in the analysis of books 1-9. (Gamberini, 374)

Imagining evidence?

Although RC claims that 10.96 “contains an unusual amount of personal thoughts and reflections” and is written in “a rhetorical style” he does not demonstrate these views with any illustrations. Gamberini cited line after line to demonstrate his descriptions of Pliny’s style. RC would help his case if he could single out just one example of “personal thought and reflection” and “rhetorical style” in 10.96 to justify his claim that it is more like letters in the first nine books than others in the tenth.

Let Pliny explain his stylistic variation

Gamberini classifies the letters of the first nine books into three types in order to analyse their style (p. 3).

Three major categories, themselves consisting of a variety of types, can initially be established:

(I) letters occasioned by practical relations or motives;

(II) letters occasioned by social relations or motives;

(III) letters corresponding to the types of oratorical excursuses. (136)

10.96 is thus excluded. But what makes for Pliny’s famous stylistic variation? Gamberini lets Pliny speak for himself:

Nor should lofty and elevated expressions always be sought. For just as in painting nothing sets off the light more than shadow, so in speech it is fitting both to lower and to raise the style.

[Original: Nec vero adfectanda sunt semper elata et excelsa. Nam ut in pictura lumen non alia res magis quam umbra commendat, ita orationem tam summittere quam attollere decet] (44)

Again,

To conclude, Pliny claims that he has followed the principle of variety of styles in an effort to please the various types of reader, so that although particular sections may not appeal to individual taste the finished whole will be appreciated by all . . . (41)

As for some of Pliny’s letters being long and others short, Pliny had his reasons:

Pliny will bolster his case for lengthiness with another argument . . . The pleader can never know what particular point will be most persuasive to the judges; different minds are affected by different arguments: hence the best policy is to bring into play as many arguments as possible in the hope that something may be gathered therefrom. This is in keeping with Pliny’s emphasis on variety . . . (29f)

The main point to be remembered with regard to Pliny’s view of amplitude of treatment is that substance must correspond to words. It is a matter pertaining to inventio, namely, the discovery of arguments which will be advantageous to the issue which one must prove. (36)

All of the above explains Pliny’s stylistic variation in the first nine books. It also explains why 10.96 does not belong in that particular collection.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glen_Echo_Carousel.jpg

The temptation of the merry-go-round

The temptation here will be to read 10.96 and interpret its details as illustrations of just what Pliny himself said should be a reason for a longer set of words. But that would be a circular argument. We need first to analyse what might be the functions of each of the details in 10.96. Are they really justified according to Pliny’s “rules”? Or do they violate the over-riding rule of the need for brevity in imperial correspondence?

RC attempts to argue that the letter is unlike others in book 10 because the subject is a unique one — Christianity. But this is an ad hoc explanation that simply ignores everything we (and Gamberini) know about why Pliny said he sometimes chose to write long letters. Nor does it explain why details are added that contribute nothing to the main point needed for Trajan to make a decision — after all, the letter acknowledges that trials of Christians were known to the emperor.

A bigger problem if Hurtado/RC are right

If 10.96 were of a comparable style (not just length) as any of the letters in Books 1 to 9, we would have a major problem on our hands. How could we explain why Pliny would at that one time decide to violate all his stated principles and style, rhetoric, oratory and lengths of letters in that one letter — especially given the simple fact that a brief letter was absolutely essential — according to his own advice stated elsewhere? Trying to excuse the anomaly by saying it was about a “unique” topic, Christianity (or religion etc), is only special pleading. Other topics (e.g. a request for a fire brigade was potentially more threatening to imperial peace) are also one-off administrative inquiries.

Understanding the method used

RC:

Tuccinardi uses only a character n-gram method. And if you read my Part 1, you’ll know why that’s a problem. Latin, like Greek, is not sufficiently like modern languages for that method to work.

On the contrary. Carrier evidently has not read basic references cited by ET that demonstrate the n-gram method is the most suitable method to apply to Latin and Greek and other highly inflected languages. Greek and Latin inflections are marked by rules of letter combinations, after all. Interested readers will find more benefit reading ET’s response than anything I could add here.

An old canard returns

RC:

Tertullian corroborates essentially the letter we have, which requires it to not only have been forged within seventy years of the original, but within the manuscripts of Pliny, which would be an incredible accomplishment for 2nd century Christians who in no way had that kind of control over pagan literature . . . Moreover, the market would be awash with independent copies of Pliny’s ten volumes then, so for Tertullian to have based an argument on a forged copy . . . he’d be outed as an easily duped joke).

Every classicist and student of Latin literature knows that Book 10 was not published along with the other books and that it was far from being of widespread renown. Its history is unclear. Tertullian is the first to witness its existence, but his remarks only confirm a part of what we have in Pliny’s letter today. (This is similar to the tradition of the Christian martyr Perpetua; Tertullian makes some remarks about her but they are insufficient to establish the authenticity of a diary of hers known later to Augustine.) There is no evidence to indicate it was widely known. Our oldest manuscript comes from ecclesiastical pens in the middle ages.

Dear RC, you have surely responded in haste and not done careful homework on this occasion. It would not hurt your reputation if you were not so quick to impute incompetence and worse to others. Take it slow. Be thorough. The results will be better for both your readers and you.

ET’s original article: An application of a profile-based method for authorship verification: Investigating the authenticity of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Trajan concerning the Christians

RC’s response: Statistical Stylometrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Horrid (Part 2: Pliny and Galen)

ET’s response (far more extensive and critical than mine – in particular with the question of peer review and RC’s choice to respond on a personal blog): Stylometry, Method and Misrepresentation: a Response to Richard Carrier on Pliny’s Ep. 10.96

And an online text of the letters of Pliny the Younger: https://archive.org/details/lettersofplinyyo0000plin/mode/2up

2025-10-11

The Tel Dan Inscription — (The Sacred “House of David” Inscription — “proof” of the biblical Kingdom of David)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Such problems are never discussed. It is obvious that the inscription has been accepted in modern Israel as a kind of magna carta for the relations between the modern state and ancient Israel, a holy text, even more holy than the Hebrew Bible and as such beyond discussion – including any discussion about the meaning of the “house of David” part of the inscription.

Some points about this inscription less well known publicly, from a passage in N.P. Lemche’s Back to Reason…..

All bolded highlighting is my own.

The inscription was linguistically without serious problems, a phenomenon Cryer noted as exceptional since no other inscription of the time and of a similar size and complexity has ever presented itself in a similarly unproblematic way; somehow they all have at least one phenomenon which has to be discussed among specialists for years. The Tel Dan inscription knows of no such problems; it is totally translatable.

The reception in those days [from 1993-94, when it was discovered] was almost universally positive, if not simply overwhelmingly positive. The only exception was the Italian specialist in Northwest Semitic languages Giovanni Garbini (1931-2017), who simply rejected the inscription as a rude falsification. Apart from a few linguistic arguments, Garbini based his rejection of the inscription on its similarity in content to, especially, the Mesha stele; it is as if you lifted the text of Tel Dan Fragment A and placed it over a similarly sized section of the Mesha inscription, an astonishing amount of identical phrases and issues appear.

The main battle over the inscription’s authenticity was, however, not fought over linguistic details; it was quite different and had to do with physical peculiarities. It is often maintained that the minimalists had to reject this inscription as genuine simply because it represented a blow to their very minimalism which rejected the historicity of King David. Those waving such opinions are unaware of two things: First of all, the Tel Dan inscription is not a proof of the existence of King David, only at best of a house of David. This is hardly a distressing surprise to the minimalists, because it is exactly what is to be expected, because there is no dearth in the Old Testament as far as references to this “house of David” go. The title “the House of David” makes David as historical as “the House of Windsor” makes Windsor a historical person, as it has been put. The second thing is that the minimalists – or not all of them – did not consider the inscription a fake from the very day of its publication. . . .

The change in attitude came late, in 1995, when Frederick Cryer returned to Copenhagen from a visit to Jerusalem where he had been at the Israel Museum with Russell Gmirkin. Gmirkin had taken a couple of perhaps not quite legal photos of the inscription. Cryer brought them back to Copenhagen for a seminar and just handed them over to me with the question: Can you see it? And it was easy to see: in the almost non-existent first line the vertical line in the “m” did, at the edge of the inscription fragment, suddenly turn to the right (it was supposed to continue in an angle to the left) – down the broken side. This means that if this is really so, the text on the slab has been engraved on it after the slab had been “produced”, which again means that it must logically be a fake inscription and not an ancient one. . . . George Athas discusses Gmirkin’s evidence but dismisses it as “scratches”, which they of course definitely are (Athas 2003, 35-9): Nobody ever said that the slippage was intentional. Finally – and it is really an ironic coincidence (?) – the problems are very clearly exposed in an unusually clear photo of the inscription by Zev Radogan printed on the cover of a book by Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past (Moore and Kelle 2011).

Such problems are never discussed. It is obvious that the inscription has been accepted in modern Israel as a kind of magna carta for the relations between the modern state and ancient Israel, a holy text, even more holy than the Hebrew Bible and as such beyond discussion – including any discussion about the meaning of the “house of David” part of the inscription. (Lemche, 106-108)

What of the actual words translated “house of David” [bytdwd]?

It is noted that the writing: bytdwd is unusual. Otherwise, words in this inscription are separated with a marker, a dot. Accordingly, we should expect bytdwd written as byt . dwd, in two words. No such marker is found here. If it is an ancient inscription we have no way of knowing the reason for this omission; perhaps a slip from the side of the engraver, but then we should ask: Why exactly here? Was it intended to catch the eye of the reader? It is simply too much of a coincidence? In the early part of the discussion this led to a series of alternative proposals to understand the meaning of the bytdwd, including proposals that it was the name of some locality in the vicinity of Dan, a sanctuary or the like. As the interpretation of the inscription assumed canonical importance, such divergent opinions were simply dismissed without further discussion. The peculiar writing bytdwd received, after Cryers intervention, no more attention, although it is exceptional to find the word bayit “house, temple, family, dynasty” written in early Aramaic as byt. Normally the -y- is left out. We should have expected in normal writing bt . dwd or maybe simply bt . dd, and the discussion should have started from this point. (Lemche, 108)

Just one more thing….

From Lemche’s Amman lecture (in Thompson):
In a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Sydney, which was recently published by Sheffield Academic Press, the Australian scholar George Athas presents a new, innovative and well-argued theory about the Tel Dan Fragments (Athas 2003). According to Athas, fragments A and B1/B2 belong to one and the same inscription, though the extant portions were some distance apart in the unbroken original. Performing a hands-on experiment in which he reconstructed the conditions under which the inscription would have been created—Athas proposes that an ancient scribe would have chalked his words on the stone surface before a skilled mason carved them—Athas was able to demonstrate that the variations in line orientation are quite in keeping with an inscription made on a large piece of stone:

If Athas is correct—and in my view his approach is quite brilliant—all earlier reconstructions of this text and its interpretation are rendered obsolete, since most of them are based on theories involving the non-existent joins. (53f)

One more issue has to be addressed before we can leave this inscription behind: the combination of the two (three) fragments into one text. It is no more seen as problematic, but it was when the combination was first made. The fragments (A and B_1-2) do no[t] align. This is obvious if we try to do so as I did in my Amman-lecture (Lemche 2003c, 53 — see side box). But do we have a join where they meet? The authorities of the Israel Museum definitely think so. I only have the opinion of a leading Israeli archaeologist of my own generation who was able to inspect the fragments before they were joined, and his response was: There are no joins. George Athas made an ingenious reconstruction of the inscription based on the angle of the chisel used to cut out the inscription on the slab, and it turned out that the angle is different on fragment A and fragments B_1-2 (Athas 2003, 191). Comparing the angles of the letters of the inscription he placed fragment B_1-2 further down than fragment A, bursting, in this way, the usual interpretation of the inscription as a victory stele of Hazael of Damascus. Of course in the light of the ongoing canonization of the inscription his challenge was never taken up and the usual but most likely impossible interpretation remains in force.⁹³

93 A question not taken up here is the one of the circumstances of the finding of the fragments. There was some confusion about the exact place where it was found, but definitely not as part of a wall of fortification. Fragment A was extracted from below a wall somehow sticking out in the open where it was discovered by the Israeli archaeologist Gila Cook. Ihe first photos of the inscription in Israel Exploration Journal 43 (p. 82) did not show it in situ but moved from its original placed out to the plaza in front of it and standing up. The confusion became total when The Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 1994, p. 38) published a photo of the inscription in situ (sic!) but inverted. The conditions surrounding the discovery of the two other fragments are not much different. As to the joining of the fragments, Hagelia presents an overview of the interpretations of the stele (until c. 2005) (Hagelia 2006, 13-50). A recent view separating fragments A and B can be found in Knauf and Guillaume 2016, 94, repeated in Knauf and Niemann 2021, 208, where Knauf admits to be the originator of this separation in his “histories”.

(Lemche, 108f)

For other related posts see https://vridar.org/tag/tel-dan-inscription/

Lemche, Niels Peter. Back to Reason: Minimalism in Biblical Studies. Sheffield, South Yorkshire ; Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2022.

2025-08-06

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 8

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Russell Gmirkin did not argue that ALL of the books of the Jewish Bible originated in the Hellenistic era. When I began to post on the earlywritings forum that “Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously” I was attempting to set out why it is both possible and plausible to conclude that “all” were Hellenistic compositions. Russell and I had some differences in both hypotheses and historical methods, but I found the details of his case for the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) being of Hellenistic origin to be very strong: see the links in my post that initiated this series.

Finally a new critic emerged on the “Academic Discussion” section of the earlywritings forum. I post his criticism here:

This is a comment on Neil’s original post in this thread and the issues it raises about general historical methodology. It may not be a response to Neil’s position as developed in later posts.

In later posts Neil has referred to arguments that the author of the Pentateuch knew Plato et al. I’m going to leave this aside.
a/ I am not at all convinced for reasons discussed in earlier threads and don’t really want to rehash those arguments.
b/ Right or wrong this is a rather different argument that the earlier ones about general methodology. If we have solid evidence of links between Plato’s works and the Pentateuch then, accepting that Plato did not know the Pentateuch, there are straightforward implications for dating the Pentateuch whatever ones general methodology.

There is an argument that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch requires a preHellenistic date. I’m going to leave this aside.
It is agreed that prima-facie the Hebrew of the Pentaeuch is much earlier than say the Hebrew of Daniel Chronicles Ben Sira but Hebrew scholars dispute how conclusive this sort of evidence is and my personal opinion is pretty much worthless.

The post is about ALL Old Testament books but I’m afraid I can’t take it seriously in this form. It may be my narrow mindedness but I’m sure Nahum for example is a pre-Hellenistic work. The same goes for Deutero-Isaiah which has real implications for tradition found in the Pentateuch. I’m going to concentrate on the idea of the Pentateuch in anything remotely like its present form being a Hellenistic work.

On the one hand we have no unambiguous pre-Hellenistic evidence for the Pentateuch. (I regard Hecataeus on the Jews according to Diodorus Siculus as authentic but this is technically extremely early Hellenistic rather than pre-Hellenistic.) On the other hand things like the Elephantine papyri suggest that the Pentateuch was not central to Jewish religion in the early Persian period. This means that prima-facie we should take seriously the idea that the Pentateuch was not only redacted in the Persian or later period but effectively created then. I have serious difficulties with a Persian origin of the Penateuch but it prima-facie should be taken seriously.

The difficulty is that neither Neil or I regard the Persian period as plausibly creative in this way, hence ‘Persian or later period’ becomes Hellenistic period. I am unable to regard this as prima-facie plausible. Apart from anything else the creation of a work that has all the signs of a long process of development and combination of different sources almost immediately before our earliest external evidence for its existence is IMO just not how things happen. I have similar problems with the idea of the NT being created around the time of Marcion. This may be a prejudice on my part, but if so then so be it.

by andrewcriddle » Fri Feb 23, 2024 9:54 pm

For the full context see the link/file at the end of this post.

What do you think of that criticism?

At first I was somewhat excited to think that a lengthy argument was being given for me to engage with, but there was precious little argument, alas. Rather, there were lots of “I’ll leave that asides” and an “I can’t take that seriously”. There was no engagement with the case I had set out for the logical fallacy at the heart of the hypothesis that the Hebrew Bible was composed over many centuries from as early as the Iron Age. There was a lot of incredulity expressed. I was disappointed. (It did not seem worthy as a submission to a forum headed “Academic Discussion”. Was the moderator himself unaware of the meaning of “Academic Discussion”? But it appears since I left the forum Andrew has been made the moderator of “Academic Discussion” so I have no desire to return there.)

I have found this among a number of people who have long been so steeped in the Documentary Hypothesis that they have come to assume it is an unarguable fact. Different types of Hebrew are assumed to be evidence of a long evolving series of biblical compositions over centuries. That different forms of Hebrew, even those known to be old, were kept alive and used by different scribes in the same era seems to be too much for them to accept as a possibility despite the scholarly arguments for it.

I posted a copy of my response to Andrew Criddle’s objections at the same time here:

Responding to a Critic of the Hellenistic Era Hypothesis for the Hebrew Bible

For the original comment in its context and responses/criticisms see

Download (PDF, 714KB)

2025-08-04

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 7

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

To follow on from my Part 2a comment …..

The biblical works have traditionally been understood as the product of an evolution over centuries, usually said to be from the ninth or eighth to the third centuries, under the influence of Mesopotamian, Hittite, Syrian, Ugaritic, Egyptian cultures.

There is a serious problem with that view, however. The absence of evidence prior to the third century for either the biblical works themselves or for the major events that the Bible narrates.

The advantage of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the “OT” is that explains

all of the cultural influences we find in the Bible

AND ALSO explains

why we would not expect to find any evidence for either the books themselves or the major events they write about before the third century.

Notice this observation from a conference paper by Jonathan Ben-Dov (I am not suggesting Ben-Dov himself has anything to do with the Hellenistic era hypothesis):

As argued above, the metaphor of influence dictates that the source culture remains unaffected by the act of the contact. Like a candle, which can light other candles without diminishing its own flame, so the great source culture is not changed by the nation which received its cultural capital. . . .

This image, however, is not necessarily true. I would like to suggest an example from the field of Hellenism, which is close in its geographical scope and not too far away in time. People often talk of ʻHellenistic Influenceʼ on Judea, Syria or Egypt. However, the very essence of Hellenism is its being an amalgam of Greek culture with the rich and ancient cultures of the East. The Hellenistic kingdoms in Syria and Egypt were by no means Greek; they combined Greek cultural elements with the ancient traditions of the hosting countries. Hellenism was a cultural entity in constant progression.

Ben-Dov, Jonathan. “The Inadequacy of the Term ʻInfluenceʼ in Biblical Studies.” Tel -Aviv University,. Accessed February 21, 2024. https://www.academia.edu/7499569/The_Inadequacy_of_the_term_Influence_in_biblical_Studies.

That’s also the essence of what the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the Primary History in particular (Genesis to 2 Kings) is all about.

In another sub-forum in earlywritings someone used to object that the Hellenistic era hypothesis “degraded” Judeans and Samaritans by suggesting they were mindless pawns who could not have their own culture. But that criticism misunderstands Hellenism — as I have attempted to make clear from the start and as we see spelled out above by Ben-Dov.

The Pentateuch and Primary History are as unique as Hellenistic era Egypt and Hellenistic era Syria. None is “Greek”. Nor are any of them traditional “Egyptian” or traditional “Syrian”. They are each distinctive cultures that have been created by the Egyptians and Syrians themselves. Ditto for the Judeans and Samaritans, I suggest. The Pentateuch is not Greek, but nor is it a product of the pre-Hellenistic Syrian Yahwist cult. What we find in the Pentateuch, however, are many echoes of Greek literature and ideologies and many references to the Yahwist ideas found throughout Syria-Negev, etc.

For the original comment in its context and responses/criticisms see

Download (PDF, 714KB)

2025-08-03

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

In this post I will explain “my personal reason” for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature — though I am sure I have come across the same ideas throughout different books and articles over the years. It follows on from #5 in the preceding post. When I wrote that I was expecting to follow up with detailed discussions from interpretations of the archaeological finds but have decided now to put that off for later.

I have more recently (subsequent to writing this post on the earlywritings forum) come across a comparable view that was expressed in a 2016 conference (my bolding):

As Jean Louis Ska suggests, The disappearance of a culture triggers off a certain type of literature. This is the case in Mesopotamia with Berossus and in Egypt with Manetho. They wrote their work in Hellenistic times when their civilizations’ glory already belonged to the past. The Torah could be – to some extent – an answer of the same type to the end of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah.

– Markl, Dominik, Jean-Pierre Sonnet, and Peter Dubovsk, eds. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. p. 6

Russell Gmirkin, it should be noted, published evidence that pointed to both Berossus and Manetho being sources for parts of the Penteuch.

My “personal vibe” that is in sync with the Hellenistic era is reflection on “the nature of the biblical literature itself”. The Primary History [i.e. Genesis to 2 Kings] is not the kind of literature that arises sui generis from a vacuum. One expects to see antecedents over time that lead to that kind of work. And the closest antecedents we find are in the Greek literature, not in that of the SyriaMesopotamian regions. Assyrian vassal treaties, the epics of Gilgamesh, of Baal, and so forth, simply fall short by comparison.

But what kind of society produces that kind of literature? It takes more than a scribal elite responsible for administrative and trade records, or even engaged in cultic verses and prayers and spells for cures, etc. The kind of literature in our Bibles required reasonably prosperous and complex societies with a literate class that engaged with the kinds of stories and ideas that had relevance to their class, ethnic and regional identities. They had to have a reasonably widespread audience to engage with those ideas and stories and whose interest or vulnerabilities or needs encouraged their literary development. The social groups must have been somewhat extensive and complex because of the various competing and related ideas found in that literature.

In other words we are talking about fairly advanced societies in economic growth and social complexity, and who also have comparable antecedent literature.

The archaeological record does point to some kind of growth of Jerusalem and surrounds in the eighth and seventh centuries, but I am not sure it really reaches the kind of level that Finkelstein and Silberman seemed to think was adequate for a “renaissance literary activity”. Besides, what kinds of antecedents were available at or up to that time to mushroom into what we find in the Bible?

The Persian era is by all accounts that I have seen in relative decline. Persian “liberal” rule that allowed Judeans and Samarians to do their own thing is more easily understood as administrative neglect, not caring at all about their development — only collecting levees for the army and taxes for the king. (Witness the Xenophon’s ability to march his Greek army untouched through the empire!)

The economic revival, with its related social growth in complexity and size, came with the arrival of the Greeks. So did the antecedent literature.

Herodotus’s Histories has a remarkably similar structure to the Primary History: opening with world history, having a close look at Egypt as a follow up, and finally getting down to the narrow view of the conflict between two powers — AND all told within the framework of a theological interest: the lesson of the deciding hand of the god through his earthly sanctuary. And all told in a series of books in prose, both frequently with competing accounts of the same event.

wesselius — Old Testament based on Herodotus? & Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel

I am not denying the obvious differences when saying that. What I’m trying to do is to draw attention to the “equally obvious” similarities. Did those similarities really emerge independently? Did the Hebrew literature really inspire that of the Greeks? Were the Judeans and Samarians in the poverty-stricken, underdeveloped Persian era really hosting a literate class devouring Greek literature? (I am on record as deploring argument by rhetorical questions so I will hasten to add that those questions are more than rhetorical: they represent a series of expectations that we must propose with hypotheses other than the Hellenistic era one.)

And then we have the ideological content of the literature. How do we explain the sudden introduction of stories of Exodus, Joshua’s Conquest, Judges, David and Solomon’s united kingdom and empire, if those — as the archaeological record tells us — never happened?

At this point it is worth looking at the propaganda use the biblical works were put to in the Hasmonean period. Were not the Hasmoneans seeking to justify their conquests by appeals to a historical heritage? In a time of Greek conquest do we not expect indigenous populations to at least sometimes seek redress by counter-narratives that put themselves in the positions of the god-blessed and ultimately greater powers? Again, these are more than rhetorical questions.

As for the divisions found even within the literature — the Samarian/Mount Gerizim point of view versus that of Jerusalem — have not scholars long since identified these differences underlying the multiple points of view (and sometimes outright conflict) within the biblical literature?

Mention has been made of Gmirkin in this thread. Before I read Gmirkin’s book I was prompted to read Plato’s Laws (as well as, again, Timaeus and Crito) by another scholar and was completely thrown back in my chair when I saw (and wondered how I had not seen it before) the striking similarities between Plato and the Pentateuch’s laws. Oh of course all those sacrifices and cultic rituals are of Levantine/Syrian/Canaanite origin, but the Pentateuch is a lot more than those.

The creation, the merging of humans and gods, the flood and annihilation, the wandering of the new generation, the coming together ….. and so forth. And then the laws about holiness, godliness, sacred feasts, marriage and sexuality, the judges and tribes, etc etc etc etc : Did Plato really twig to all of that from his reading of the Pentateuch? (At least one scholar has addressed the relationship of a scene in Plato’s Symposium with the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)

And further yet — how many scholars have noticed the similarities between the biblical Yahweh and the Greek Dionysus? I have read the comparisons a number of times. Surely pre-Hellenistic Yahwism was distinctively Levantine, with no appreciable differences between the Yahwism of Samaria, Judea, Negev, Canaan, Syria…. So what gave him the Greek overlay in the Bible?

Okay — these are my generally subjective responses to how I read the literature of the OT with my knowledge of Greek literature in mind. I have not presented a systematic argument, I know. But for what it’s worth, I thought it might be of some point to note how I have come to read the literatures of the Hebrews and Greeks and the conclusions that seem to present themselves to me as a result.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:29 pm

To read the original post in context and to see Stephen Goranson’s critical responses ….

Download (PDF, 684KB)

2025-08-02

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

By the way, I have informed Stephen Goranson that he is welcome to respond here to my resposting of his criticisms of Russell Gmirkin — despite my earlier prohibition on his posts to this blog. For this series alone I have lifted my relegation of SG’s comments to spam.

In Part 4 I pointed to discussions that answered a list of criticisms against the case that the Hebrew Bible was composed prior to Hellenistic times. Those discussions were mostly from other blog posts of mine but they covered what had been repeated at various times in the earlywritings forum. For anyone interested in the details and context of Stephen Goranson’s ongoing discussion of my responses to his list of data points (that he presented as “evidence” of pre-Hellenistic biblical writings) see the copy of the page at the end of this post.

What follows here is the second part to my attempt to justify the plausibility (even greater explanatory power) of the Hellenistic provenance of all (though Russell Gmirkin would, I think, have said only “most”) the books of the Old Testaments. In my opening post (Part 1) I addressed the circularity underpinning the dominant current view of the Documentary Hypothesis. This time I branched out into the data that is better explained by the Hellenistic era thesis.

I included this in my discussion on the earlywritings forum — again, see the link below for the context.

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

There is more to the Hellenistic provenance thesis than the simple fact of the circularity of the methods of dating the OT books by the past conventional scholarship — something that so far not even SG has denied. Given that SG’s reference to Langlois (when read in full) also allows at least for the possibility of a Hellenistic provenance, we have room to continue.

Archaeology reveals

1. The archaeological evidence of pre-Hellenistic Judea-Samaria has demonstrated that major moments of biblical history are fictions. The “invasion” of Canaan by an “Israelite” ethnic group never happened. The most that can be said about the “Kingdom” of David and Solomon is that it was little more than a village incapable of extending dominance over any area of note. (Jamieson-Drake saw evidence of development from a “lower-order society” to a “chiefdom” in Jerusalem, which falls far from the level of “a state”.)

Why write fiction?

2. The question must arise, then, why such stories were told? Were the stories derived from historical memories? Archaeology has suggested that is unlikely. A fundamental and inescapable fact of any literature is that it must reflect the ideas and beliefs and understandings that are part of its cultural matrix. One specific ideological feature of the narrative of David is that it shares manners, customs, assumptions that we find in the Persian kingdom. One might therefore wonder if the stories were told as part of ideological hopes for an imminent greatness, or at least as an attempt to identify with other great powers, whether of the past and/or present.

But what kind of fiction?

3. The literary structure and style of the Primary History (Genesis-2 Kings), as other scholars (not those arguing for a Hellenistic origin, by the way) have shown, is comparable to the Histories of Herodotus. The closest genre to the Primary History is found in the Greek world. Another comparable genre is the autobiographical narrative. Some scholars have attempted to explain this observation by speculating that Greek works were well known to the subjects of the Persian empire or that even the biblical books were known to the Greeks and influenced the Greeks. One needs to look for the explanation that raises fewest difficulties or questions.

Nothing uniform — why?

4. There are vastly different styles among the biblical books. One can explain this fact by positing a long period of evolution and various cultural influences over centuries. One can also explain the same fact by positing contemporary regional differences. As one scholar noted, imagine if all we had about Socrates were the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Would we have to assume that there was a vast time gap between the two accounts since they are so at odds in so many ways?

What kind of society?

5. One ought also to look at the kind of socio-cultural-economic society that would be required to produce the biblical literature. Here again the archaeological evidence can be interpreted in favour of the Hellenistic period. But this is a vast topic of its own.

The argument emerges from other hypotheses

The scholars I have had in mind while setting out the above points have, with one exception, not been advocates of the Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature. The archaeological evidence that discounts the historicity of “biblical history”, the comparisons with Greek literature and Persian royal ideologies, — all of these are found in works of scholars who never entertained a Hellenistic time setting, as far as I am aware. Philip Davies himself (with whom I began in the OP) always argued for the Persian era for the Primary History and Prophets.

But there are also problems with a Persian era setting that disappear if we move the compositions of the books to the third century.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 11:24 am

In the next post I will set out my personal reason for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature.

The original forum exchange:

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2025-08-01

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 4

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Stephen Goranson has been a regular critic of Russell Gmirkin. Stephen posted the following points (in the earlywritings forum) that he claimed gave reasonable grounds for dating the entire Hebrew Bible (he referred to the “TaNaK“) before Hellenistic era:

There are reasons to consider some TaNaK texts to be older than third century, some of which have been discussed here.

Qumran texts, safely considered to be copies rather than autographs, show developments over time. And some may themselves may be older; at least, so Michael Langlois (name searchable here) has argued concerning some paleo-Hebrew mss. Few have been radiocarbon dated (more to be published). Statistically it is unlikely that the oldest one has yet been tested and published.
Deir ‘Alla inscription.
Silver amulets.
It is not plausible that temple priests, before third century, were illiterate and had nothing to read.
Semitic language history. A recent–Feb. 14, 2024–observation, for example: “A marginal linguistic difference between the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible” by Benjamin Suchard https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/14/a-marginal-linguistic-difference-between-the-pentateuch-and-the-rest-of-the-hebrew-bible/

by StephenGoranson » Tue Feb 20, 2024 5:11 am

As Stephen Goranson noted, several of those points had been discussed previously on that forum so one might have expected him to have addressed what had already been presented as responses to his claims that they pointed to a pre-Hellenistic date for the Jewish Bible. I posted my response to Stephen’s reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Michael Langlois’ argument in an earlier Vridar post:

Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?

As for the Deir ‘Alla inscription, I posted my own observation about how it could well be interpreted as confirmation of Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic era thesis. See

When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]

On the silver amulets, see my discussion at

Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh

Stephen’s next point — implying the Hellenistic era hypothesis was declaring that priests “were illiterate and had nothing to read” — is just silly.

As for the difference between the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible, we cannot assume that the only explanation for the difference must be a long period of development, and I am sure Stephen knows this. Recently I translated a French work by a couple of renowned biblical and archaeological scholars that included this section:

Linguistic Evidence?

Can the question of the date of the texts of the Pentateuch, or of other biblical texts, be resolved by distinguishing between Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew—a distinction that would offer certain seemingly objective criteria for dating biblical texts? It is not surprising that this method has gained a significant number of adherents, particularly in North America and Israel; we will not go into detail here.19 Let us simply highlight a few precautions to observe in using this method. First of all, we must ask, with E. Ullendorf and E. A. Knauf, whether Biblical Hebrew was truly a spoken language.20 The evidence for the existence of so-called Classical Hebrew21 outside the Bible is limited to a few inscriptions and personal names, which do not allow us to affirm that there existed a unified “Classical Hebrew” during the monarchical period. We must allow for dialectal variation in extrabiblical written and oral texts and, more importantly, for differences between literary language and vernacular language. Furthermore, there is no doubt that certain late texts like Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) differ from what is called Classical Biblical Hebrew. But texts that may well be as late as Ecclesiastes can also be written in perfectly “Classical” Hebrew, as is the case with Zechariah 1–8 and the extracanonical Psalm 151.22

Finally, it is also very difficult—if not impossible—to draw a clear dividing line between “Classical” and “Late” Biblical Hebrew. As C. Edenburg recently observed, biblical texts that all scholars agree are late (from the Persian period) share with Iron Age Hebrew/Moabite inscriptions a preference for direct object suffixes attached to verbs.23 This means that we cannot assert a linear development.24 “Biblical Hebrew” is, above all, a literary language, whose lifespan would have extended beyond the spoken stage (if such a stage ever existed), and which endured in the scribal milieu. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew—especially when applied to an entire book—fails to take into account the widely recognized fact that every biblical text is the product of a long process of composition and revision. It thus appears that the scribes were capable of preserving or even partly inventing a language that had not been spoken for many centuries. We must therefore be cautious when claiming that the entire Pentateuch was composed before the Exile simply because it is mostly written in Classical Biblical Hebrew.25

[19] C. EDENBURG, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose of Judges 19–21, Atlanta, SBL, 2016, 115–123.

[20] E. ULLENDORF, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1977, 3–17 ; E. A. KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? », in K. SCHMID et al. (éd.), Data and Debates, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2013, 411–423 (421): « l’hébreu biblique n’a jamais été une langue parlée. »

[21] KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache ? » remet même en question la plausibilité d’un tel concept.

[22] I. YOUNG, « What Is “Late Biblical Hebrew” ? », in E. BEN ZVI et al. (éd.), A Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2009, 253–268 (258–259).

[23] EDENBURG, Dismembering, 120–121.

[24] Voir I. YOUNG, « What Do We Actually Know about Ancient Hebrew », Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 11–31, qui remet en question ladite théorie des trois étapes (hébreu classique, hébreu tardif et hébreu mishnaïque), voir également des appréciations différentes du livre de Job par A. HURVITZ, « The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered », Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974), 17–34, et par I. YOUNG, « Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew ? », Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009), 606–629.

[25] M. EHRENSVÄRD, « Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew », Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament 11 (1997), 29–40.

(Translation of a section written by Thomas Römer)

— Finkelstein, Israel, and Thomas Romer. 2019. Aux Origines de La Torah: Nouvelles Rencontres, Nouvelles Perspectives, Paris. 2019. (My electronic copy that does not include page numbers.)

The original discussion in context:

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2025-07-30

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I’ve addressed the Documentary Hypothesis several times before (see a list of post beginning here). The DH is the basis through which the Hebrew Bible is understood to have begun its development as early as the days of David and Solomon, and in the time of the Babylonian Captivity and through to the period of the Persian Empire. Russell Gmirkin took up the proposal of Thompson and Lemche that the Pentateuch and other biblical texts had their origin as late as subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, less than 300 years before the common era.

Here are a few of my posts in the Academic Discussion section of the Earlywritings Forum that attempted to draw attention to the circularity at the heart of the DH.

Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

It had been suggested on the forum that by claiming circularity was at the heart of the DH there was some “caricature” of the DH involved, that the DH was not being presented in a fair way. So I went back to the source and in response to being asked “who” exactly dated the texts in such a way, wrote (I was writing to an audience whom I assumed would know that Julius Wellhausen was the principal pioneer of the DH (=Documentary Hypothesis):

By whom? Here is what Julius Wellhausen wrote in Prolegomena:I.II.2

The Jehovistic Book of the Covenant lies indeed at the foundation of Deuteronomy, but in one point they differ materially, and that precisely the one which concerns us here. As there, so here also, the legislation properly so called begins (Deut. xii.) with an ordinance relating to the service of the altar; but now we have Moses addressing the Israelites in the following terms: “When ye come into the land of Canaan, ye shall utterly destroy all the places of worship which ye find there, and ye shall not worship Jehovah your God after the manner in which the heathen serve theirs. Nay, but only unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes for His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shall ye bring your offerings and gifts, and there shall ye eat before Him and rejoice. Here at this day we do every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes, but when ye have found fixed abodes, and rest from your enemies round about, then shall the place which Jehovah shall choose for His habitation in one of your tribes be the one place to which ye shall bring your offerings and gifts. Take heed that ye offer not in every place that ye see; ye may not eat your holy gifts in every town, but only in the place which Jehovah shall choose.”

The Law is never weary of again and again repeating its injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in conscious opposition to “the things that we do here this day,” and throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming party at Jerusalem. As the Book of the Covenant, and the whole Jehovistic writing in general, reflects the first pre−prophetic period in the history of the cultus, so Deuteronomy is the legal expression of the second period of struggle and transition. The historical order is all the more certain because the literary dependence of Deuteronomy on the Jehovistic laws and narratives can be demonstrated independently, and is an admitted fact. From this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was this very Book of Deuteronomy . . .

The whole reasoning process begins with the assumption of the historical veracity (at least in its core) of the biblical Josiah account. From that assumption it follows that the book of Deuteronomy was the source of those reforms (after all, Deuteronomy attacks false worship, just like Josiah did) and therefore Deuteronomy had to have been in existence before the time of Josiah.

That is an invalid argument. How do we know Deuteronomy existed before Josiah? Because the Josiah narrative tells us so? How do we know the Josiah narrative is based on true history? Because the book of Deuteronomy explains his motivation for the reforms. How do we know the book of Deuteronomy explains his reforms? . . . . gets dizzying….

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:58 am

—oo0oo—

The above failed to impress, so I added another:

Here is another demonstration of the circularity in the dating of Deuteronomy to the time of (or before) Josiah. It is from William Dever in Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (2017), pp 611-613.

First, Dever reminds us of the importance of archaeology in assessing the historicity of the biblical accounts:

[A]rchaeological data are primary because an external witness is required to lend support to the historicity of the biblical narratives, if possible, and archaeology is, by definition, the only candidate (including, of course, the texts that it may recover). Archaeology is primary because it provides an independent witness in the court of adjudication, and when properly interrogated it is often an unimpeachable witness. (p. 18)

Agreed 100%.

But then compare that noble statement with how he actually uses archaeological data to “confirm” a biblical narrative:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. His reputation as a reformer, a restorer of tradition, comports especially well with the more favorable situation that we know obtained with the decline of Assyria

Correlation is not a proof. Dever lists in a table what is explicitly proven by archaeology at the time of Josiah:

“Poly-yahwism”; Asherah cult; Yahu names; Philistia attacked (p. 609)

In the same table he lists as “Probable; Evidence Ambiguous”

Josiahʼs attempted reforms; consulted temple scroll; maintained Judah even if vassal; Josiah slain in battle, 609

So archaeology, according to his own analysis, does not confirm the historicity of the Joshua narrative. Nonetheless, he proceeds to set forth a list of correlations with the biblical account — as if correlations can ever be anything more than correlations. (Compare the correlations with historical data of any historical novel.)

He begins on page 11:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. . . .

Numerous studies of these intriguing reform measures attributed to Josiah have been published, but few have paid any attention to possible archaeological correlates—that is, to a possible real-life context in the late seventh century. Most scholars have focused on whether the reform was successful, many assuming that the reforms claimed are simply too fantastic to be credible. The fact is, however, that we have good archaeological explanations for most of the targets of Josiahʼs reforms. For instance, we know what high places (bāmôt) are, and we have a number of examples of them, perhaps the most obvious example being the monumental one at Dan.

No-one denies the biblical authors were familiar with the various popular cults of the day. Simply finding evidence of these brings us no closer to finding any support for the historicity behind the narrative of Josiah and the discovery of Deuteronomy.

We have many altars in cult places and private homes, large and small. We even have an example of the altar on the roof in the debris of a building destroyed at Ashkelon in 604.

The sacred poles and pillars are easily explained, even in the Hebrew Bible, as wooden images or live trees used to represent the goddess Asherah symbolically. The tree iconography has now been connected conclusively with the old Canaanite female deity Asherah, whose cult was still widespread in Iron Age Israel, in both nonorthodox and conformist circles (above).

The weavings, or perhaps “garments” or even “curtains,” for Asherah (Hebrew bāttîm) remain a crux. Renderings by the Septuagint, the Targumim, and later Jewish commentaries suggest a corrupt Masoretic Text, but woven garments for deities and tent-like hangings for sacred pavilions are well known in both the ancient and modern Middle East.

The phrase “heavenly hosts” needs no archaeological explanation, since it clearly refers to the divine council well documented at Ugarit and in the Hebrew Bible. The reference to the “horses and chariots of the Sun” recalls examples that we have of terra-cotta horse-andchariot models from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal is the “Cloud Rider” who flies across the heavens daily as the great storm god, imagery that is even applied to Yahweh in Psalms.

The Topheth in the Kidron Valley (a rubbish dump and place of abomination in any case) is readily explained by the famous sanctuary of Tanit at Carthage, where infant sacrifice was the usual rite, and there the Phoenician god was indeed Molech.

Of the various “pagan” deities condemned—Baal, Asherah, Ashtoreth of Sidon, Kemosh of Moab, and Milkom of Ammon—all are well known, as is their iconography and to some degree their cult practices.

It is not only the description of the specifics of the religious situation in Josiahʼs time that is realistic in the light of the current archaeological data. The general context of cultural and religious pluralism in the seventh century is an amalgam well illustrated by the archaeological data that we have summarized above, beginning already in the eighth century. That context helps to answer the question raised above about whether the Deuteronomistic Historiansʼ original version fits in the actual historical-cultural setting of the seventh century in Judah. It can be shown in many ways that it does but in other ways that it does not, even though the written version could have been almost contemporary (the question of an older oral tradition cannot be resolved).

It is instructive to set the central themes and ideals of the Deuteronomistic program as summarized above alongside a general description of the realities of life in seventh-century Judah as illuminated by the archaeological evidence here.

And that’s it. All Dever’s archaeological evidence has managed to do is to tell us that there is no evidence for Josiah’s reforms as per the biblical narrative. No-one has questioned the polytheistic/poly-Yahwist cult prevalent throughout Judah/Samaria/Negev/Syria. The biblical narrative assumes that most of the population did not practice “biblical Yahwism”. The whole point of the narrative is to give some historical context to the book of Deuteronomy.

One may reply that the biblical narrative exaggerated and the reforms were not so successful after all, but it won’t really do to imagine all sorts of reasons why we still do not have the evidence for the historicity of the narrative. We will always need independent evidence to confirm the narrative. Until we have it we cannot validly work on the assumption that we will one day find the evidence we know “must be there somewhere” to justify our dating of the sources.

Dever’s words above are a classic instance of the very problem Davies was addressing. The archaeological evidence is interpreted through the assumption that there is a historical core in the biblical narrative. Without the biblical narrative there is simply no grounds in any of the evidence cited by Dever that would lead anyone to suspect the event of Josiah’s reforms.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 2:54 pm

—oo0oo—

Is the above not enough to demonstrate that the DH is built on circularity?

Continuing ….

The original discussion in context and in full:

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2025-07-29

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 2

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In response to the post that I copied here, one consistent critic of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis in particular (and of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Hebrew Bible more generally) posted the following response:

Elephantine is the site of a Persian era garrison settlement of Jews in Egypt. For an discussion of the relevance of this site for the dating of the Old Testament texts see the post re Elephantine Jews.

I had referred to the Elephantine remains here, pointing out that some scholars have suggested the Documentary Hypothesis (that assumes a long pre-Hellenistic history for much of the Hebrew Bible) would never have gained any traction if the the Elephantine papyrii had been discovered earlier.

My response:

That is logically correct. But the Elephantine remains, in the absence of remains pointing in the opposite direction, do “indicate” (as per the Opening Post) the absence of any knowledge or regard for the Pentateuch. They certainly do not support the conventional dating.

Nor are the Elephantine remains entirely irrelevant to the question:

. . . the Elephantine community stood in contact with Jerusalem. Although Elephantine was located on the traditional southern border of Egypt, it was not an isolated outpost on the fringe of the world. The Nile was navigable all the way from the Nile delta to Elephantine. A journey from Elephantine to Jerusalem might take approximately one month. In comparison, according to the Bible it took Ezra around four months to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem. In terms of travel time, the Judaeans in Elephantine were much closer to Jerusalem than was the priest-scribe who is often accorded great importance in the (re-)formation of Judaean religion in the Persian period. Whereas this may indicate potential contact and demonstrate that the historical-geographical conditions for travelling between Elephantine and Jerusalem were more favourable than those between Babylon and Jerusalem, it is also evidenced by documents from Elephantine that there was actually a two-way contact between Jerusalem and Judah (and Samaria). Not only did the Judaeans in Elephantine know the names of the tenuring governors of Judah and Samaria (in this case, even the names of the sons of the governor) and the high priest in Jerusalem (cf. A4.7 par.), they also wrote letters to them and even got a reply (although the Judaeans in Elephantine regret that the Jerusalem high priest and his colleagues did not respond to their initial letter).

Fourth, the Elephantine documents are contemporary sources and probably even more representative of the lived and practiced Yahwism of the Persian period than are the biblical texts. . . .

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. pp. 4ff

What Wellhausen wrote in 1921 about Elephantine continues to be the view of those who hold to conventional pre-Persian dates for the various literary sources that were melded to compose the Pentateuch.

Just a few years after the discoveries of the documents of the Jedaniah communal archive, Julius Wellhausen characterised the community as a “merkwürdiger Überrest des vorgesetzlichen Hebraismus.” In his view, the community located at the border between Egypt and Nubia adhered to its “altes Wesen.” Wellhausen regarded the Judaeans in Elephantine to be standing “noch auf der vorgesetzlichen Stufe,” in contrast to the elite of postexilic Judah. In his view, the Judaean community at Elephantine represented a “fossiler Überrest des unreformierten Judentums.”

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. p. 18

Do you have a comment on the circularity of the conventional dating of works like E, J, the Deuteronomist?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am

—oo0oo—

The above should suffice. But on the off-chance that my interlocutor is reading these posts I had better be sure to be absolutely fair and include his every word that he wrote in response to my arguments. The remainder of this post is included for that reason alone, though the extract from P.R. Davies might be of more general interest.

—oo0oo—

To which I replied:

The Hellenistic provenance can be argued without reference to the Elephantine finds. It is the absence of evidence not only at Elephantine but elsewhere, especially in the region of Canaan, that does make the Hellenistic argument (on other grounds) possible, however.

The argument for a Hellenistic provenance stands quite independently of Elephantine. The Elephantine finds were introduced as supporting evidence.

I would be interested to know if you have a comment about the critical grounds for criticism of the conventional dating of the earliest sources for the OT — the circularity of the argument and lack of independent supporting evidence. Example, the logic of the argument for Deuteronomy being composed in the time of Josiah? or the logic of the argument for other material being composed in the Babylonian captivity or even in the time of the Persian empire?

and in hope of getting into some nitty gritty of exactly how Elephantine finds could be relevant, I asked:

Would you be interested in discussing the Elephantine finds and their specific relevance to the knowledge of “some Torah books” in the Persian era in another thread if I open it up?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am and 7:07 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, there was to be no further attempt to explain how the Elephantine evidence had any relevance to the Hellenistic date of what became the biblical writings. Instead, SG appeared not to have followed the demonstration of how circular reasoning lay at the root of conventional dating of the Hebrew Bible and insisted that the claim of circularity was nothing more than a presumption, an assertion.

—oo0oo—

I hoped a little more detail might dispel the notion that Davies merely asserted circularity instead of demonstrating how it happens in actuality. This was, after all, a newly constructed “Academic Discussion forum” with clear rules for exchanges so I still held hope that SG would respond in a scholarly manner.

I know what the proposed sources for the Torah books are. The problem I am trying to note is that the conventional dating of sources such as J, E, D, P is circular and therefore invalid.

The point about circularity is not a mere assertion or presumption. It is demonstrated in the links I posted in the OP.

Here is what Davies wrote in 1992, and I think it deserves a response:

So far, historical research by biblical scholars has taken a different and circular route, whose stages can be represented more or less as follows:

1. The biblical writers, when writing about the past, were obviously informed about it and often concerned to report it accurately to their readers. A concern with the truth of the past can be assumed. Therefore, where the literary history is plausible, or where it encounters no insuperable objections, it should be accorded the status of historical fact. The argument is occasionally expressed that the readers of these stories would be sufficiently knowledgeable (by tradition?) of their past to discourage wholesale invention.

2. Much of the literature is itself assigned to quite specific settings within that story (e.g. the prophetic books, dated to the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah).13If the biblical literature is gene rally correct in its historical portrait, then these datings may also be relied upon.

3. Even where the various parts of the biblical literature do not date themselves within the history of its ʻIsraelʼ we are given a precise enough account in general to enable plausible connections can be made, such as Deuteronomy with the time of Josiah, or (as formerly) the Yahwist with the time of David or Solomon, Psalms with a Jerusalem cult. Thus, where a plausible context in the literary history can be found for a biblical writing, that setting may be posited, and as a result there will be mutual confirmation, by the literature of the setting, and by the setting of the literature. For example, the Yahwistʼs setting in the court of Solomon tells us about the character of that monarchy and the character of that monarchy explains the writing of this story.

4. Where the writer (ʻredactorʼ) of the biblical literature is recognized as having been removed in time from the events he14 describes or persons whose words he reports (e.g. when an account of the history of ʻIsraelʼ stretches over a long period of time), he must be presumed to rely on sources or traditions close to the events. Hence even when the literary source is late, its contents will nearly always have their point of origin in the time of which they speak. The likelihood of a writer inventing something should generally be discounted in favour of a tradition, since traditions allow us a vague connection with ʻhistoryʼ (which does not have to be exact) and can themselves be accorded some value as historical statements of the ʻfaithʼ of ʻIsraelʼ (and this will serve the theologian almost as well as history).

Each of these assertions can be encountered, in one form or another in the secondary literature. But it is the underlying logic which requires attention rather than these (dubious) assertions themselves. That logic is circular. The assumption that the literary construct is an historical one is made to confirm itself. Historical criticism (socalled) of the inferred sources and traditions seeks to locate these in that literary-cum-historical construct. The placement of sources and traditions in this way is then used to embellish the literary account itself. This circular process places the composition of the literature within the period of which the literature itself speaks. This is precisely how the period to which the biblical literature refers becomes also the time of composition, the ʻbiblical periodʼ, and the biblical literature, taken as a whole, becomes a contemporary witness to its own construct, reinforcing the initial assumption of a real historical matrix and giving impetus to an entire pseudo-scholarly exercise in fitting the literature into a sequence of contexts which it has itself furnished! If either the historicity of the biblical construct or the actual date of composition of its literature were verified independently of each other, the circle could be broken. But since the methodological need for this procedure is overlooked, the circularity has continued to characterize an entire discipline—and render it invalid.

The panoply of historical-critical tools and methods used by biblical scholars relies for the most part on this basic circularity.

Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. pp 35-37

So you can see it is not a mere assertion of presumption. It is demonstrated.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:36 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, SG appeared to be impervious to registering any possibility that conventional wisdom might have an insecure foundation and curiosly claimed that the extract from Davies (above) was a “caricature”!

—oo0oo—

I had mixed feelings about that response. At least he recognized that the reasoning being described was invalid. But how did he fail to understand that it is in reality how the conventional dating argument has been made?

But still, with new rules in a new forum, surely participants would soon find their feet…..

2025-07-26

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 5A – ‘the placement of the Testimonium Flavianum’.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Schmidt 200x300 — **Placement of the TF:**
**1st disturbance:** Resistance to Pilate’s attempt to smuggle imperial images into Jerusalem
**2nd disturbance:** Resistance to Pilate’s expropriation of Temple funds
**3rd “disturbance”:** Jesus and his followers
**4th disturbance:** Shameful Isis priests bring destruction on themselves and their temple
**5th disturbance:** Criminal Jews lead to expulsion of Jews from Rome

Despite the hopes I expressed in my previous post I simply cannot complete even one more response to Tom Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Instead, I will place here my draft that addresses only one small part of Schmidt’s rationale for finding the Jesus account placed in the midst of various disturbances. Better to half-fulfil a promise than to come up with a complete blank. Please keep in mind that the following is a copy of my draft. Normally I would take time to tidy up the wording and structure.

Tom Schmidt writes (my bolded highlighting):

First, its placement. In the Antiquities, the TF [i.e. the Testimonium Flavianum, the Flavius Josephus’s testimony about Jesus] is situated amid five different stories of uproar, all of which tell of murder, intrigue, blasphemy, and other wrongdoing. Given the context, it is unlikely that a Christian scribe would have risked associating Jesus with such themes by inserting the TF amid a litany of evildoers and disturbances, as the author of the TF pointedly does. (Schmidt 2025, 128)

Sounds reasonable. But then I recall reading the following:

The Christian movement itself was doubtless a θόρυβος [“disturbance”], the greatest disturbance of all . . . [T]he Christian movement was so obviously a disturbance of the first magnitude, as it is represented in the New Testament . . . (Thackeray 2007, 140f)

With that perspective in mind, surely a Christian scribe who was pretending to be Josephus would consider it most appropriate to place the Jesus passage in the middle of disturbances that horrified or at least were noted by a Jewish author. Thackeray does not suggest a Christian did add the account there but by acknowledging its appropriateness from the perspective of a non-Christian Jew he does allow for one to think even a Christian impersonating Josephus would likewise consider its place among other disturbances in the time of Pilate quite suitable.

Even so, the account about Jesus and his followers is not depicted as a disturbance. Any notion of a disturbance must come from the reader’s knowledge of how “the Christian movement” was “represented in the New Testament”.

Further — it is just as reasonable to suggest that a Christian scribe would relish placing his Gospel-informed Jesus in a position to suggest his power to unsettle the Jewish rulers.

Note: one must know both the canonical gospels and Acts to see this episode as a “disturbance” and so justify its “placement” among somewhat comparable episodes.

Schmidt argues that because in Josephus we read that Jesus was crucified, it logically follows that Jesus must have been a subversive, a rebelitious, and the reader is meant to conclude that he created some kind of disturbance. But that is not what we read in Josephus’s text. The passage does not describe any kind of disturbance initiated by Jesus. Disturbance has to be read into the passage, not out of it.

On the contrary, the passage in Josephus leads any reader ignorant of the New Testament to wonder why Jesus was crucified given that it infers that Jesus’ followers felt renewed spiritual inspiration after the crucifixion, and that the crucifixion accelerated their movement rather than handicapped it.

Finally, one enduring aporia in New Testament scholarship concerns the question of why Jesus was crucified. Pilate, a figure who is historically cruel and unintimidated by mobs, in the gospels yields to mob pressure to crucify a man he knows to be innocent – even though that mob had days earlier venerated the same Jesus. Religious leaders, who in historical accounts are known for their popular sympathies, in the gospels hate Jesus because he does good. If we assume the gospels are trying to hide the “real reason” for the crucifixion to protect theological interests, then we would surely be right to expect an independent historical record, one written by a Jew/Judean whom the gospels represent as the enemies of Jesus, would explain for us exactly why Jesus was crucified.

But no. The Josephan account knows nothing more than the Gospels. The Josephan account is just as mysterious as the gospels. It leaves the reason for the crucifixion unexplained.

I’d like to think that I will post 5B later this year/early next year.

Postscript on the seditious Jesus hypothesis:

To veer off into another question – of course the crucifixion of Jesus is at its core a theological event, not an historical one. Its reason is theological. As such, it is constructed narratively around the Jewish Scriptures that point to a saving figure who must take on all the sins of his people, to suffer their worst humiliations and weaknesses, to be despised as a nobody, as an evildoer, even as a rebel. The motifs are theological, not historical. The rebel-bandit-robber motif is as consistent with the interests of the authors as are the miracles and resurrection. And this is where the current “seditious Jesus hypothesis” collapses at the starting post.

Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thackeray, H. St John. 2007. Josephus: The Man and the Historian. With George Foot Moore and Samuel Sandmel. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger.

2025-07-07

“You may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I will continue writing posts in response to Thomas Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence so this post is a quick interjection before I have the time to write more fully about another Jesus hypothesis that appears to be being widely discussed at the moment — the hypothesis that Jesus was an anti-Roman rebel, a seditionist, in particular, the following book:

Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2023. They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha. Fortress Academic.

(We met Fernando Bermejo-Rubio as recently as my last post, by the way, where I examined his citational support for Josephus writing a negative passage about Jesus.)

The reason I am jumping in early at this time is to flesh out (just a little) some responses I have made in discussions relating to other posts. It’s been a long time since I posted about historical methods, especially as they relate to Jesus, so consider this a brief reminder or recap.

Bermejo-Rubio repeats a common assumption:

As Justin Meggitt has rightly observed, “to deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”

I responded to Justin Meggitt’s claim back in 2020. It is available here:

The Great Method Gap between “Biblical Historians” and Historians in History Departments

Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus

A few of my other posts addressing the same question of how we know about ancient persons and whether the evidence for Jesus is comparable to anyone else:

HISTORICAL METHOD and the Question of Christian Origins (a summary of sound historical method)

And a lot more are listed here:

Ancient Historiography and Historians — Vridar Posts

When Historical Persons are Overlaid with Myth

Other statements by Bermejo-Rubio that struck me as misguided:

After all, although some biographies of ancient historical characters such as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus contain quite a few mythical elements in their framework, it does not justify our disputing in principle the historicity of the characters themselves . . .

That point is answered in the above posts. When historical figures are overlaid by others — and even by themselves — with mythical trappings (e.g. Alexander as Dionysus, Hadrian as Hercules), we can see clearly where the real human is distinct from the mythical propaganda image.

Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures

Another:

Had Jesus been a construct created out of whole cloth, the accounts about him would presumably have been far more homogeneous. The fact that our sources are systematically inconsistent and are riddled with incongruities is better explained if we assume that a real character on the stage of history was modified in the later tradition.

johnston.2 e1751836623839 150x150 — Sarah Iles Johnston explains why the inconsistencies in mythical gods and heroes have made them so appealing and believable.

Quite the contrary. It is real historical figures that emerge with fair measures of consistency; it is the mythical characters who are riddled with contradictions and incongruities. In fact it is the inconsistencies that are part of the enticing mystery and allure make such figures so attractive and believable! See

And one page that sums it all up in a simple table:

The Bible — History or Story? — where I sum up the error at the base of so much biblical studies by distilling the main points of Philip Davies pivotal publication.

But for now — back to work on some other aspects of Thomas Schmidt’s argument for Josephus making a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Christian origins. . . .

(By the way — questions of historicity and authenticity do arise in classical studies, too. I look forward to posting a few instances and comparing how they are approached by ancient historians and scholars with a primary focus on biblical studies.)

2025-07-01

Pitfalls in Seeking Authenticity in Ancient Texts

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Biblical scholars are not a unique species. Though many of them do seem to be unaware that they are presenting a one-sided view of the evidence, and indeed they are often blind to the logical flaws in their arguments, but they are not alone. As I recently posted here:

I have in the past few months discovered that this is not a flaw restricted to biblical scholars. I have encountered the same wishful thinking and flawed methods of argument among Classicists who desperately seem to want a certain first hand account of a Christian martyr, and woman as well, to be authentic. So I have to have a bit more understanding of the foibles of biblical scholars, I guess.

Below is my essay that illustrates exactly how some Classicists in a certain niche area of study display some of the same kinds of flaws as biblical scholars. The blemishes too easily come to the fore when scholars believe they are face to face with the earliest evidence for Christian origins and therefore want to find ways to accept a core base of those sources as authentic — rather than accept the fictional character that is normally associated with that kind of evidence.

Perpetua was a female Christian martyr in Carthage in the year 202 CE. You can read a little about her and the account of her last days attributed to her on Wikipedia. I will add a few side boxes to supplement my original essay where I think it might make it more useful for general readers. (The original essay was submitted as an assignment task in a course I am currently undertaking at Macquarie University.)

How Historians Have Engaged With Perpetua’s Account of Her Final Days in The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity

It seems a wise principle that the burden of proof rests on those who doubt or reject the textual data from antiquity, not on those who accept them. . . . [T]he proof must be provided by those who question the ancient data.^[1]

In response to the above words of Vinzent Hunink, this essay seeks to demonstrate that several arguments for the authenticity of Perpetua’s authorship of her prison experiences in The Passion Of Saints Perpetua And Felicity (Passio) are flawed logically and lack the independent support historians normally rely on to establish ancient claims. In doing so I will refer to alternative approaches of other historians. By authenticity I mean the proposition that the author of Perpetua’s account in the Passio was the historical Perpetua martyred at Carthage around 203 CE.

Hunink provides three grounds for accepting the authenticity of Perpetua’s prison diary:

(a) its “marked stylistic features and personal details”,
(b) Hunink’s inability to imagine a reason for it not being written by Perpetua,
(c) and the Passio’s statement that Perpetua wrote her account.^[2]

In objecting to doubts whether Perpetua was an actual author, he writes

there should be grave, compelling reasons to make us reject the evidence from antiquity as far as authorship is concerned.^[3]

Hunink is here equating “the textual/ancient data” (i.e. the written document) from which we build a hypothesis (i.e. that it was authored by such-and-such) with the “evidence” called upon to test that hypothesis. It is circular to claim that the data explained by our hypothesis itself is the evidence that confirms our hypothesis. This particular protest against doubts is logically flawed.

Jacqueline Amat’s critical edition and discussion of the Passio is widely cited and a work to which scholars have been said to owe a “permanent and immeasurable debt” for its “outstanding” contribution.^[4] I will therefore refer repeatedly to her work. Amat stresses the authenticity of Perpetua’s account by appealing to

(a) its independently verified historical context;
(b) its literary style;
(c) and the realism of her dreams.

Amat thus recognizes the importance of providing an independently verifiable and datable historical context:

= Severus ordered the persecution of all new converts. The arrest of Perpetua and her companions therefore fits within a policy of repression against catechumens.

Sévère ordonnait de poursuivre tous les nouveaux convertis. L’arrestation de Perpétue et de ses compagnons s’insère donc dans une politique de répression des catéchumènes.^[5]

Amat points to Eusebius, the Historia Augusta, and works by J. Moreau and W.H.C. Frend to learn of this specific repression. Unfortunately none of these references provides the external support Amat seeks. Eusebius has been judged (a) as relying more on his ability to invent a history “the way it should have been” according to his apologetic perspectives^[6] and (b) as being motivated for personal reasons to dwell on multiplying and glorifying instances of martyrdoms.^[7] Moreau and Frend use tentative language when speaking of the edict: “Les modalités d’application de l’édit de 202 sont mal connues dans le détail”;^[8] “Eusebius was largely ignorant of events in the west”, “for the sake of dramatic effect”, “do not contradict”, “ring of truth”, “balance of probabilities”, “falls short of proof”, “relatively truthful”, “circumstantial evidence”.^[9] By identifying this edict with the one reported of Severus in Historia Augusta, moreover, Amat contradicts the statement by Timothy Barnes that it is “demonstrably fictitious”.^[10] This is striking since Amat relies on Barnes in the same journal of the previous year to establish her next point. By overlooking studies from the 1960s that address reasons to doubt the historicity of the Severus decree, even concluding it “to be an historical fiction”,^[11] Amat’s reading of the evidence is over-selective. Finally, the Passio itself indicates that Perpetua was deeply knowledgeable in the Bible so one must wonder if she had been the kind of new convert the decree supposedly targeted.

The next independently attested item cited is the matching of Perpetua’s date of martyrdom with the birthday of Geta, information that arguably could only have been known to a contemporary of Perpetua given the state-ordered erasure of all memory of Geta after his death. While Amat relies on the argument of Barnes here,^[12] Ellen Muehlberger points out that Barnes’ case is based on one manuscript that differs from others.^[13] Amat appeals to J. A. Robinson’s surmise that copyists removed the name Geta in light of the damnatio memoriae.^[14] Like Hunink, Amat is effectively claiming as evidence for the hypothesis the data the hypothesis claims to explain – that Passio was composed in the time of Geta. A genuinely independent assessment of the hypothesis (assuming that the name Geta was in the original work) would also compare other possible explanations that posit the flavour of historicity being a literary artifice – as provided by Thomas Heffernan:

[T]he redactor is at pains throughout the narrative to provide historical veracity . . . so as to promote [Perpetua’s] value as being equal to the “old examples of the faith” . . . . The allusion to Geta thus complements the redactor’s historicizing intent, which is to legitimate the New Prophecy among his fellow communicants.^[15]

Ironically, in making this point, Heffernan attributes to Perpetua an authentic voice behind words that conflict with it—an inconsistency more easily explained by a single author.

The final appeal to independent verification for the authenticity of the Passio is the assertion that Perpetua’s contemporary Tertullian mentions it.^[16] Tertullian may indeed have known of the Passio but his actual words can only be taken as a reference to the text if one already assumes that it existed in his time:

= How is it that Perpetua, most valiant martyr, saw only martyrs there in her vision of paradise on the day of her passion, unless it is because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to no one except those who have died in Christ, not in Adam?

Quomodo Perpetua, fortissima martyr, sub die passionis in reuelatione paradisi solos illic martyras uidit, nisi quia nullis romphaea paradisi ianitrix cedit nisi qui in Christo decesserint, non in Adam?^[17]

That Tertullian confuses the dreams of Perpetua and Saturus in the Passio is forgiven by Amat and other scholars as normal human memory lapse. The data does not fit so it is forgiven and still interpreted as confirming the hypothesis. A more rigorous investigation ought to consider an alternative proposal that potentially has wider explanatory power: that Tertullian knew of a free-floating Perpetua story that was later written down. That alternative is able to explain not only Tertullian’s contradiction but also the apparent loss of the Passio until the time of Augustine who initially expressed doubts about its authenticity.^[18]

Thus Amat’s attempts at setting a historical date and context for the Passio begin with the assumption that it contains an authentic historical account and then set aside contrary independent evidence and explanations.

To avoid circularity it is necessary to turn to relevant external or independent data. This is the approach of Ellen Meuhlberger:

On this point about Augustine — I failed to address the fact that Augustine is also evidence of public commemoration of Perpetua and Felicity being observed prior to his time. This failure could be seen as my own “lack of balance” in the discussion at this point.

The most valuable tool readers have to contextualize any text is its reception. . . . The first writer to make precise reference to Perpetua’s account is Augustine of Hippo . . . of the fifth century. . . .^[19]

Not only do we have no indisputable evidence that the Passio existed until the fourth century, but when we do find it mentioned, it happens to express the ideas found in other texts of that later time:

. . . a text that expresses themes evidenced in the fourth and fifth centuries may well itself be a product of the fourth and fifth centuries.^[20]

Since Robinson the primary argument that has reportedly swayed most scholars to embrace authenticity has been about Perpetua’s style.^[21] But what is it about this style that convinces? For Amat, authenticity is demonstrated by “strikingly beautiful” words in the face of death, so beautiful that they “can hardly be considered apocryphal”:

= She is sustained by the certainty that at the moment of her passion Christ will be at her side, and this conviction inspires a very beautiful response—one that cannot be believed to be apocryphal (15.6).

Elle est soutenue par la certitude qu’au moment de sa passion le Christ sera à ses côtés et ce sentiment lui dicte une fort belle réponse, qu’on ne peut croire apocryphe (15, 6).^[22]

Yet two pages earlier Amat had appealed to content far from beautiful as grounds for believing the work to be authentic:

= Saturus faces martyrdom with his flaws [namely, a pride that is somewhat too haughty and an intransigence that is somewhat too biting], and this is a sign of the narrative’s authenticity.

Saturus affronte le martyre avec ses défauts [sc. d’une fierté un peu trop orgueilleuse, d’une intransigeance un peu trop mordante] et c’est là un gage de l’authenticité du récit.^[23]

So both beautiful and the less beautiful are felt to be signs of authenticity. Here we are surely encountering another instance where a case is “guided by a telos of confirmation, rather than exploration.”^[24]

A different stylistic feature is identified as a marker of authenticity by Brent Shaw. Not strong beauty or the introduction of embarrassing character flaws but the plain, prosaic “simple reportage” of her experiences, an “unmediated self-perception, her reality” now becomes the stylistic evidence of authenticity:

Perpetua’s words . . . differ so much in the fundamental aspect of simple reportage from all other so-called “martyr acts” . . . . Hers is a direct account of actual human experience, a piece of reportage stripped of … illusory rhetorical qualities . . . . [T[here is something, perhaps ineffable, that marks her words as different in kind from any comparable piece of literature from antiquity.^[25]

Amat saw both the sublime and the flawed as witnesses of authenticity; Shaw appeals to unadorned “simple reportage”. Yet in a footnote Shaw concedes that the simplicity and directness of the language could after all be “the result of conscious or semiconscious ‘rhetorical’ strategies as much as anything else”.^[26] Such a concession surely undermines his main point that the simplicity of the account was the sure sign of it being of direct and unmediated reportage.

Even scholars who have discerned aspects of style that were not likely penned by Perpetua have still clung to the view of Perpetua being the ultimate author, suggesting that she knowingly left her words to be adapted by recorders or editors.^[27] (See the quote at note 15 above.) Such scenarios look like ad hoc attempts to maintain a case for authenticity as appreciation for stylistic features has deepened since Robinson.

Eric Dodds is also convinced that Perpetua’s account is authentic by

(a) the simplicity of style,
(b) it being “entirely free from marvels” (he overlooks the miraculous cessation of lactation)
(c) and its dreams being “entirely dreamlike”.^[28]

Where “another author”, the redactor, has provided an account that complements or comments on Perpetua’s statement both Dodds and Shaw cannot imagine that these additions might be part of a common project to produce the Passio.

[T]his unmediated self-perception, her reality, was subsequently appropriated by a male editor . . .^[29]

[C]ertain incidents appear to have been introduced in order to provide a fulfilment of prophecy. . . .^[30]

Shaw and Dodds, on the presumption of authenticity, thus treat Perpetua’s journal without reference to “the textual data” of the Passio’s whole.

Two scholars against whom Hunink was protesting when he appealed for a prima facie acceptance of the “textual data” actually are more consistent in their acceptance of that data than Dodds and Shaw. Shira Lander and Ross Kraemer accept the Passio as a literary unity and accordingly find a two-way dialogue between Perpetua’s story and its surrounding text that is suggestive of a unity Shaw and Dodds deny:

[T]he startling degree to which details of the Passio conform to the biblical citation of Joel 2:28–29/Acts 2:17–18 in the prologue . . . contributes to our concerns. It is possible, indeed perhaps tempting, to read the Passio in its present form as a narrative dramatization of this citation . . . . Many elements of the Passio conform closely to the particulars of this prophecy. . . . The extraordinary emphasis on Perpetua’s role as a daughter . . . . coheres exceedingly well with the characterization of the female prophets as daughters.^[31]

Whether one accepts this interpretation or not, it can be acknowledged that it is firmly grounded on Hunink’s “textual data” itself. Surely any “textual data” can only be fully understood if read in the context of the literary heritage of its author, or with reference to texts independent of the one being studied. Authenticity is a proposition that needs to be argued, not assumed.

Hunink was focussed on the content of the Passio (e.g. noting the editorial claim that Perpetua wrote her own story). He failed to appreciate the way the Passio “worked” as a literary composition. As Megan DeVore noted, Hunink allowed the flaws in Erin Ronsse’s article to blind him from her more substantial point: its literary sophistication. Ronsse attempted to make this point by detaching it from the question of authenticity but the authenticity question could not be ignored.^[32] DeVore takes the literary unity of the Passio much farther by identifying intertextuality with other early Christian texts and engagement with teachings and images in Clement of Alexandria and Hermas. It is the editorial frames that work with Perpetua’s account to create a “collective memory” because of their allusions to other early Christian literature. For DeVore (and as I mentioned above) a richer understanding of any literary work requires reading it in the context of other works of its era and in the light of ancient rhetorical theory.^[33] DeVore even treats Perpetua as an authentic author,^[34] but an argument for literary sophistication undermines the reasons others have believed in authenticity.

One detail illustrates how different assumptions lead to different conclusions over authenticity. Dodds was confident that Perpetua’s dream of being given cheese was a sure sign that the dream could not be “a pious fiction” since the image had no relevance to Christianity at the time.^[35] DeVore, however, by widening the frame of reference through which we read the Passio shows that cheese did indeed have directly relevant Christian symbolic meaning in Clement’s Paedagogos.^[36] The image was there to be deployed by Perpetua or any other author.

Peter Dronke illustrates the dilemma arising when simplicity of style is taken as the rationale for authenticity. Dronke cannot ignore “the writer’s artistry” but feels uncomfortable that he notices it at all. What is “artless” is “artistry”. He dares not praise it.

From the outset we see that Perpetua . . . is not striving to be literary. There are no rhetorical flourishes, no attempts at didacticism or edification. The dialogue is (I think deliberately) artless in its shaping . . . . [S]he was recording her own outer and inner world . . . with shining immediacy. . . . Where writing wells up out of such fearsome events, it seems impertinent, or shallow at best, even to praise the writer’s artistry. . . . [S]he did not try to make her experience exemplary.^[37]

If “deliberate”, surely it cannot be said to be “artless”, and if it did not seek to be edifying, one must ask why it was read for edification among believers through the centuries.

Many authors have long understood the potential power of a simple narration and Dronke seems to be torn between being guiltily impressed by “the writer’s artistry” and a contradictory belief that it fundamentally really is what it strives to be without literary manufacture. But literary art with emotional impact does not have to be infused with baroque flourishes. It can appear very simple and natural. Megan DeVore shows how Perpetua’s account of herself coheres with literary principles set out by Aristotle. What appears brief and disjointed in the narrative – “lacking literary artifice”, one might say – can draw a reader in to appreciate the nobleness of Perpetua’s character:

While . . . narrative of section 9 seems prima facie to be little more than a disjointed rendering of two events, the seemingly laconic section relays a significant rhetorical antithesis and further develops the image of Perpetua for her audience.^[38]

Perpetua’s dreams have also been viewed as evidence of authenticity, and again we find sometimes contradictory reasons in arguing for this case. For the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz the authenticity of the dreams was seen in the fact that the images were not exclusively Christian:

= As for the authenticity of the visions . . . it may be pointed out that in all the visions not a single purely Christian motif appears; rather, they consist entirely of archetypal images that were common to the pagan, Gnostic, and Christian imaginative worlds of the time. . .

Was . . . [die] Echtheit der Visionen anbelangt . . . läßt sich . . . darauf hinweisen, daß in allen Visionen kein einziges rein christliches Motiv auftaucht, sondern lauter archetypische Bilder, die der damaligen heidnischen, gnostischen und christlichen Vorstellungswelt gemeinsam waren . . .^[39]

For Shaw “there is no reasonable question of their authenticity”.^[40] For Amat, the dreams are “realistic” and therefore they should not be deemed fabricated:

= But it must be emphasized that, like true dreams, they exhibit both syncretism and subjectivity. One can therefore dismiss the hypothesis that these accounts are fabrications. They undeniably bear the mark of lived memories.

Mais, il faut y insister, des songes véritables, elles ont le syncrétisme et la subjectivité. On peut donc écarter l’hypothèse . . . selon laquelle ces récits seraient des affabulations . . . . Ils portent indéniablement la trace de souvenirs vécus.^[41]

Amat refers to Franz’s view but adds, contradicting Franz, that it is their Christian frames of reference that make them, in part, the evidence of their reality. Amat stresses the mix of lived experiences and “de souvenirs littéraires ou scripturaires” that supplant pagan associations:

= But pagan culture surfaces only faintly beneath its Christian and scriptural adaptation. . . . The scriptural elements are more allusive in Perpetua’s dreams: details drawn from the Apocalypse are joined to Jacob’s ladder, the serpent from Genesis, and the abyss from the Gospel of Luke.

Mais la culture païenne ne fait qu’affleurer sous son adaptation chrétienne et scripturaire. . . . Les éléments scripturaires sont plus allusifs dans les songes de Perpétue : les details issus de l’Apocalypse s’unissent à l’échelle de Jacob, au serpent de la Genèse ou à l’abîme de l’Évangile de Luc.^[42]

It is natural to assume that a Christian martyr would have biblical images on her mind but in favour of Franz’s view is the point that Perpetua was apparently a new convert so it might be fair to question the extent of her biblical knowledge. Does Amat’s Perpetua know the Bible too well? While conflicting explanations do not per se negate authenticity, they invite scrutiny of potential confirmation bias.

In her discussion of the dreams it is difficult to tell if Amat is speaking for the beliefs of the authors and editors of the Passio or for herself and her audience when she writes:

= Such a mixture [i.e., of lived memories and scriptural memories] is characteristic of genuine dream manifestations. This observation in no way undermines the notion of revelation. The Spirit, in order to make itself heard, passes through all the images that lie within the dreamer’s consciousness.

[U]n tel mélange [sc. souvenirs vécus and de souvenirs scripturaires] caractérise les véritables manifestations oniriques. Ce constat n’entame nullement la notion de révélation. L’Esprit passe, pour se faire entendre, par toutes les images qui reposent dans la conscience des songeurs.^[43]

If the latter, we can understand the pull of wanting Perpetua’s words to be historically authentic. But motive aside, it is widely understood that realism of description does not necessarily establish authenticity.^[44]

One more facet in the study of the Passio that has been used to argue for a female author, and by implication the Perpetua of the diary herself,^[45] is the motif of breast-feeding and lactation.

The Passio includes references to breastfeeding from a lactating woman’s point of view; . . . symptoms . . . including anxiety, pain, and engorgement . . .^[46]

The references certainly express a “woman’s point of view”, but the question of authenticity of Perpetua’s account is not necessarily tied to the gender of the author. On the other hand, Dova also observes that “there is a wealth of evidence about wet-nursing in Perpetua’s time”, so it is reasonable to expect that some men were quite aware of what it involved. More significant, however, are Perkins and DeVore noting that imagery of nursing mothers and infant feeding was well established in early Christian writings:

[E]mphasis on lactation and parturition . . . are so rhetorically pertinent to the discourse of the period in Carthage as evidenced by Tertullian as to make suspect the women’s authenticity as real persons.^[47]

I suspect that, in her references to nourishment and lactation, Perpetua participates far more in common symbolic imagery than in a personally cathartic diurnal divulgence.^[48]

For a good number of scholars the Passio is a unique document, a primary source to inform us directly of the mind of a martyr and of a woman in the third century Roman empire,^[49] as well as being an inspiration for all, especially for women, as a testimony of courage and independence of spirit.^[50] These are strong reasons for wanting an ancient source to be both unique and authentic. Other historians have warned against the professional hazards of being seduced into accepting sources as historically reliable^[51] and naively embracing texts at face value.^[52]

I have attempted to single out a few areas where scholars take different approaches to reading the Passio. My focus has been on what I consider to be some of the shortcomings underlying an acceptance of Perpetua’s account as “authentic”. I have sought to do this by identifying flawed reasoning, a tendency to find confirmation of authenticity in various textual and independent data without examining alternative explanations for the same data, a failure to address the rhetorical methods that create the emotional impact on reading the Passio, and a limited appeal to the literary context of the early Christian centuries.

Notes

[1] Hunink, “Did Perpetua Write Her Prison Account?,” 150, 152.

[2] Hunink, 150, 152.

[3] Hunink, 150.

[4] Farina, Perpetua of Carthage, 6f.

[5] Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 21.

[6] Droge, “The Apologetic Dimensions of the Ecclesiastical History,” 506.

[7] Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, 165.

[8] Moreau, La Persécution du Christianisme dans L’Empire Romain, 81.

[9] Frend, “A Severan Persecution? Evidence of the « Historia Augusta »,” 470.

[10] Barnes, “Tertullian’s ‘Scorpiace,’” 130.

[11] Kitzler, From Passio Perpetuae to Acta Perpetuae : Recontextualizing a Martyr Story in the Literature of the Early Church, 15, note 59.

[12] Barnes, “Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum,” 509–31.

[13] Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 323.

[14] Robinson, The Passion of S. Perpetua, 25.

[15] Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 76f.

[16] Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 20.

[17] Tertullian, “De Anima,” LV 4.

[18] Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 325–27.

[19] Muehlberger, 333.

[20] Muehlberger, 338.

[21] Butler, The New Prophecy and “New Visions,” 47. Butler sees both Robinson’s and Shewring’s analysis of style as paving the way for the near consensus on authenticity, but Robinson is discussed as the lead figure.

[22] Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 35.

[23] Amat, 33.

[24] Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” 324.

[25] Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 19, 22, 45.

[26] Shaw, 20, note 50.

[27] Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, 76; DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 236.

[28] Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 49f, 52.

[29] Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 20f.

[30] Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 49.

[31] Lander and Kraemer, “Perpetua and Felicitas,” 984.

[32] Ronsse, “Rhetoric of Martyrs,” 385.

[33] DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 36ff.

[34] DeVore, 230–31.

[35] Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 51.

[36] DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 147.

[37] Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete, 1, 6, 16f.

[38] DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 172f.

[39] Franz, “Die Passio Perpetuae. Versuch Einer Psychologischen Deutung,” 411.

[40] Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 26.

[41] Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index, 42.

[42] Amat, 42, 45.

[43] Amat, 42.

[44] Johnson, “Third Maccabees: Historical Fictions and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Period,” 196f; Van den Heever, “Novel and Mystery: Discourse, Myth, and Society,” 93f; Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies, 23–28.

[45] Cotter-Lynch, Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages, 19.

[46] Dova, “Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in The Passion of Saint Perpetua,” 260.

[47] Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era, 160.

[48] DeVore, “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing,” 125.

[49] Rader, “The Martyrdom of Perpetua: A Protest Account of Third-Century Christianity,” 2f; Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” 12f.

[50] Perkins, “The ‘Passion of Perpetua’: A Narrative of Empowerment,” 838.

[51] Finley, Ancient History, 21.

[52] Clines, What Does Eve Do To Help?, 164.

Bibliography

Amat, Jacqueline, ed. Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes : Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Commentaire et Index. Sources Chrétiennes 417. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1996.

Barnes, Timothy D. “Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum.” The Journal of Theological Studies XIX, no. 2 (1968): 509–31.

———. “Tertullian’s ‘Scorpiace.’” The Journal of Theological Studies 20, no. 1 (1969): 105–32.

Butler, Rex D. The New Prophecy and “New Visions”: Evidence of Montanism in the “Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.” Patristic Monograph Series 18. Washington (D. C.): Catholic university of America press, 2006.

Clines, David J. A. What Does Eve Do To Help?: And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament. Sheffield, England: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1990.

Cotter-Lynch, Margaret. Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator, Saint. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016.

DeVore, Megan. “Narrative Traditioning and Allusive Gesturing: Perpetua Reconsidered.” Ph.D., University of Wales Trinity Saint David (United Kingdom), 2015.

Dodds, Eric R. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Dova, Stamatia. “Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in The Passion of Saint Perpetua.” Illinois Classical Studies 42, no. 1 (April 1, 2017): 245–65.

Droge, Arthur J. “The Apologetic Dimensions of the Ecclesiastical History.” In Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, edited by Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata, 492–509. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Farina, William. Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2008.

Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. New York: Viking, 1986.

Franz, Marie-Louise von. “Die Passio Perpetuae. Versuch Einer Psychologischen Deutung.” In Aion: Untersuchungen Zur Symbolgeschichte, 387–496. Zürich: Rascher, 1951.

Frend, W. H. C. “A Severan Persecution? Evidence of the « Historia Augusta ».” In Forma Futuri. Studi in Onore Del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino., edited by Michele Pellegrino, 470–80. Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1975.

Grant, Robert M. Eusebius as Church Historian. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1980.

Heffernan, Thomas J. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Hunink, Vincent. “Did Perpetua Write Her Prison Account?” Listy Filologické / Folia Philologica 133, no. 1/2 (2010): 147–55.

Johnson, Sara R. “Third Maccabees: Historical Fictions and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Period.” In Ancient Fiction. The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative, edited by Jo-Ann A. Brant, Charles W. Hedrick, and Chris Shea, 185–97. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Kitzler, Petr. From Passio Perpetuae to Acta Perpetuae : Recontextualizing a Martyr Story in the Literature of the Early Church. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.

Lander, Shira L., and Ross S. Kraemer. “Perpetua and Felicitas.” In The Early Christian World, edited by Philip F. Esler, Second., 976–95. London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

Moreau, Jacques. La Persécution du Christianisme dans L’Empire Romain. 1er Édition/3e Trimestre 1956. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France, 1956.

Muehlberger, Ellen. “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 30, no. 3 (2022): 313–42.

Perkins, Judith. Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era. London & New York: Routledge, 2008.

———. “The ‘Passion of Perpetua’: A Narrative of Empowerment.” Latomus 53, no. 4 (October 1994): 837–47.

Rader, Rosemary. “The Martyrdom of Perpetua: A Protest Account of Third-Century Christianity.” In A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the Early Church, edited by Patricia Wilson-Kastner, 1–17. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981.

Robinson, Joseph Armitage. The Passion of S. Perpetua. Facsimile Reprint. Piscataway, N.J: Gorgia Press, [1891] 2004.

Ronsse, Erin. “Rhetoric of Martyrs: Listening to Saints Perpetua and Felicitas.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14, no. 3 (September 2006): 283–327.

Shaw, Brent D. “The Passion of Perpetua.” Past and Present 139, no. 1 (1993): 3–45.

Tertullian. “De Anima.” Accessed May 26, 2025. https://www.tertullian.org/latin/de_anima.htm.

Van den Heever, Gerhard. “Novel and Mystery: Discourse, Myth, and Society.” In Ancient Fiction. The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative, edited by Jo-Ann A. Brant, Charles W. Hedrick, and Chris Shea, 89–114. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Woodman, A. J. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies. London : New York: Routledge, 2004.

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A Message to Richard Carrier:

To Everyone Else:

Misreading other scholarship

Whose hand is waving?

No work required to check….

Carrier & Hurtado versus Gamberini

Imagining evidence?

Let Pliny explain his stylistic variation

The temptation of the merry-go-round

A bigger problem if Hurtado/RC are right

Understanding the method used

An old canard returns

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Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

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Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

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Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

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My response:

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Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus

When Historical Persons are Overlaid with Myth

Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures

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How Historians Have Engaged With Perpetua’s Account of Her Final Days in The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity

Notes

Bibliography

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