mountainman

Toto,

Tradition has it that the new testament was authored by the disciples in bad greek for a greek audience. How can Philip do this if the author of the Acts of Philip admits that Philip cannot understand either greek or latin? Oh, ok, they umm "spoke instead in umm tongues". Sure. This is not ancient history.

People in the fourth century who knew neither Latin or Greek, unfortunately as bigotted as it may sound toto, these same people would have been looked upon, from the Roman emperor and his greek speaking philosophers, such as Sopater whom Constantine had executed for example, from the position of Eusebius and the entire succession of his continuators in greek and latin, as illiterate. We are looking down the barrel of a satire.

Best wishes,


Pete

Toto

Tradition? There is no such ancient tradition. There were European scholars who did not understand that the gospels were written in Koine Greek, which is a separate language from classical Greek, so they assumed that it was "bad Greek."

That's why I think that the Gospel of Philip is relying on the canonical gospel stories, from which one might assume that Peter was an illiterate speaker of Aramaic, who required Mark to translate for him.

Unless, of course, they saw this as part of a story.

So where is the humor?

patcleaver

MM,

There were hundreds perhaps thousands of small cults in the Roman Empire. Constantine and Eusebius could have chosen any of them for his new religion. Many of those cults must have had various gospels that he could have revised for his purposes.

The fact that there is no reasonable archeological evidence for the existence of Christianity before Constantine, does not prove that there was not some small Christian cult in Rome.

If there really were persecutions under Diocletian and Galerius 303-311, (no archeological evidence or copies of the edicts exist) then all Christian literature was probably burned or confiscated. It would have been easy to select from the confiscated books and revise them to fit Constantine and Eusebius purposes.

Why do you think it is more likely that Constantine and Eusebius invented the Christian story in whole rather then rewriting existing gospels of some tiny Christian cult for their own purposes?

patcleaver

MM, Thanks for answering, but You need to get into the statistics.

The C14 date ranges are not just "error bands". The C14 analysis defines a probability distribution. The +- 60 years is the 95% limit. Even though 319 is within the band, it is very unlikely that the date was as late as 319. I can not do the calculations without my old statistics book, but its probably less then 10%.

It is also highly unlikely that the gThomas dated 345 was from as early as 319, and even more unlikely that both of these things are true.

Also, its highly unlikely that we have the earliest copy of the gJudas. The C14 date of this copy of the gJudas just represents the latest date that the gJudas could have been written.

patcleaver

avi, you seem to have a working knowledge of this stuff. please check the following:

The C14 date for the gJudas 290 +- 60 years is reported to be at 95% confidence (two standard deviations). The C14 date of the gThomas is similarly reported to be 348 +- 60 years.

One standard deviation +- 30 years would be a 68% confidence

What is the probability that:
1) The actual date of the gJudas is 320 or later = 16%.
2) The actual date of the gThomas 328 or earlier = 16%.
3) That both 1 and 2 are true about = 2.5%

mountainman

[QUOTE=Toto;5578974]Dear Toto,

Please try for one moment what it would have been like standing in the shoes of people like Crispus, Arius of Alexandria, and the academic pythagorean philosopher and some form of old lineage priest, Sopater. Each of these people were more or less executed by Constantine. Imagine yourself to be politically opposed to any dictator or malevolent despot of your choice. In such a circumstance you would be looking down the barrel of being accused of sedition and treachery against the authority of the boss.

And such was the status of both the authors, and the books themselves, known as the apochrypha, that they were outlawed and forbidden and and far worse.

The humor in the apochryphal NT literature rests in characteristic satire of the corresponding characters (as some form of Constantinian cast) in the NT canon. The humour can only be understood if we ourselves place ourselves back in the fourth century, under the oppressive military rule of Constantine, who was destroying the ancient architecture and he ancient traditons. It was not a nice epoch and one which understandably greatly contributed to the dark ages, so to speak.

Do I need to cite Ammianus and the torture of the upper classes, the excessive taxation, the book burning, the temple destruction, the mass persection and intollerance of the imperial christian regime of the mid-to-end fourth century? Do not dismiss Rassias' estimates on this. And have you checked the Extracts from the Codex Theodosianus (313 to 453 CE) .

The satire is the same as Julian's satire, only earlier. The satire was directed against the christian state regime which had suddenly appeared at the gathering of Constantine's 318 bishops at Nicaea and trhe xpulsion of Arius of Alexandria from all future considerations. The satire was directed against the fiction of a despot.

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Dear Patcleaver,

I agree with you on this matter. However having said this, I need to add that until such evidence is forthcoming, it is not an unreasonable thing to do, to consider that the new testament was in fact written under the sponsorship of Constantine the Great, and that the subsequently victorius christian regime destroyed much evidence which would expose this fraud.

In that case we need to understand that the books of the followers of the Iranian prophet Mani were so treated by Diocletian. The Manichaean persecutions continued well into the fifth century. They had an historical base with the persians, and with Diocletian. There is independent evidence of this, but no independent attestation to any "christian persecution".


Why think small if you are going to be the biggest thug on the planet? Especially if you already hold the ancient city of Rome, the hub of the ROman empire in all other things but the eastern gold, gold, gold.... The Pontifex Maximus was permitted to think big.

He had the cash.

Perhaps the gospel of John was fabricated from the long last books of Apollonius of Tyana, who may well have written about the logos, but the other three eyewitness accounts are simply a porridge of fiction assembled from the LXX and other pagan wisdom literature. Eusebius adds the histories and ready-reckoners, atlas's, guides, compendiums, horror stories to scare the children, etc, etc.

The wisdom held in the NT is certainly older than the fourth century and has been mentioned by Philo and others earlier, such as Heraclitus. However I am going to continue to dispute that the NT canon is of Constantinian invention and chronology, and that the NT apochrypha immediately appeared after 324 and 325 CE as seditious satirical parody of Jesus and the various acts and gospels of the twelve (or was it 13?) apostles.

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

The estimate is just that. We need to be guided by it.

The likelihoods or otherwise of earlier versions of these texts is in the strict sense conjectural. We need to establish this as a separate issue and distinct from what the C14 is trying to tell us.

In which century do you think people started carring around codices for example Pat, rather than scrolls? Were scrolls or codices being transported by hand in the first century? In the 2nd? In the 3rd? We know there were lavish codex publications by the fourth.



Best wishes,


Pete

J-D

You have given no reason to consider thus, and if there is no reason to do so, then it is an unreasonable thing to do.

bacht

Do you include all the non-canonical material in this scenario? There seems to have been more material that was left out of the NT than was eventually included. Would it all have been invented at the same time, then sorted through as to its Catholicity? [sorry if you already answered this]