Xoroaster's Fake 'Scholarship'
Channel: Brain Outy
Date: 2013-08-29

Video in question:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTi7WyVkWw .  TruthCeeker333 made a nicer reply (than I do) to Xoroaster's video, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=retGTDrzz68 .  By contrast, I ream Xoroaster out, because he should be censured by every atheist on the planet -- for DISHONESTY.  Or, stupidity. Take your pick. Video explains why he's a SHAME to atheism.

He's not good at proper citations, either.  If you have the Works of Josephus in hardback, the proper reference is Wars of the Jews, Book 6, line 300 and following.  If you're using BibleWorks to read Josephus, select JOE for English, JOS for the original Greek, and then '6' and then '300', to get to the same place (BW aligns the books as chapters).  That text is in Josephus' Book 5, but in many copies of Josephus the Chapters aren't separated out.  So Xoroaster is also ignorant of the citation convention of using the LINE NUMBER for the starting place.  Shameful.  If you're going to pretend to be a scholar, then do your citations properly!

CONTEXT shows that Josephus is on the topic of the war culminating in Masada, which was thirty years AFTER Jesus the Christ, had DIED.  So it cannot be the same Jesus as in the Bible.  Which Josephus makes plain in his own text, but apparently Xoroaster, even when reading aloud, doesn't know what he's reading!  My video here, explains why.

Xoroaster tries to jerryrig a claim that the Bible is somehow based on Josephus' account, because 'Jesus' and 'Stone' and 'killed' are used in the latter.  PULEESE.  First, Xoroaster is ignorant of Greek, so can't tell that the Greek of Matthew is a full generation OLDER than the Greek of Josephus.  Just as, the way people spoke English in the 1960's is very different from today.  We know this, because most of the Roman world spoke Greek in the first century (if you were cultured), so we have a LOT of that Greek outside the Bible, for comparison.  It changed every decade.

So Josephus, writing in the last 30 years of the 1st century, uses the later idiom -- more like Mark's Gospel, which is demonstrably THIRD, not first;  it came out just after Paul died.  Luke's is in the middle, written a decade before.  All this, you can tell if you COMPARE THE GREEK of the Gospels, relative to the Greek outside the Bible written at the time.  NEVER date a language by the age of what it's written on.  Shakespeare is still olde English, even if in a newly-published paper text!

So our boy Xoroaster FLUNKS the 'scholarship' test, by not knowing any of this, instead shooting his mouth off by manufacturing three similar words in the Gospels and in Josephus:  'Jesus', 'stone', and 'killed'.  Sheesh.

Then, later in his video, Xoroaster proves ignorant of the Old Testament, which all Jews referenced in their daily speech, since forever, and of course even still today.  So just because some Jew named Jesus (of which there must have been 100s, if not 1000s) runs around quoting the Old Testament, which Josephus briefly recounts, doesn't mean he's the same 'Jesus' as in the Bible.

Finally, If you have William Whiston's paperback of Josephus' Works, the text in question is on page 742, right-hand column, January 1995 edition (Tenth printing, which is extremely common).  That matters, as the text is very much the same as Xoroaster uses in his video.  So at least he's using a common translation, whew.

I've never had to make a video like this before, and I hope I never have to, again.   Too much fake scholarship in atheism AND in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.  It should be censured.  If we let it go, we partake in its evil, 2John9-11.