Bill wrote:
>> But suppose the text we're
trying to understand it Josephus' "The Wars of the Jews." Here is a text
that claims to be history, written by a man who lived in another day and
was part of a different culture. Historians trying to assess the veracity
of his account have indeed studied the grammatical constructs very
carefully.<<
I am not sure that this is really correct. They examine very carefully the
events described, but I don't know of many history texts which discuss why
Josephus used various Greek words and not others. In fact I went and got my
copy of Josephus. I looked at the footnotes. I failed to find a single
footnote discussing which word Josephus used, or to say that this or that
word was not in the original text. But I can find lots of those types of
notes in the Bible. Why? Because we view the Bible differently than we view
the work of Josephus. There were lots of footnotes in Josephus referring to
historical events and knowledge but not to the grammar.
glenn