Jeffrey Gibson

What other Pohlsander book on Constantine is there?

Jeffrey

mountainman

Dear Jeffrey,

Give me a week to get back to the library.

But if you are intereested in the meantime about claims - what about the possibility that Arius of Alexandria and Leutius Charinus may be the one and same author. Do non-canonical texts make you uneasy? If in fact Arius of Alexandria authored "The Acts of Thomas" etc would this make you uneasy?

I took the liberty of numbering (1), (2) and (3) the three principles of shall we say "equivalence" in theory between the canonical and the non canonical sets of new testament literature.

Does anyone agree or disagree with these three principles?

Best wishes,


Pete

spin

It's dead, Jim.

J-D

I have no problem with the three principles you quoted from Tony Chartrand-Burke or Chartand-Burke, whichever it is (you used each spelling twice). What intrigues is that you should cite them. By arguing for a methodological even-handedness in approaching canonical and non-canonical Christian literature, he presupposes that there is such a thing as non-canonical Christian literature, and he specifically refers to it in his principles as having been written by Christians, which is incompatible with the view that you're peddling that the so-called non-canonical Christian literature was in fact written by anti-Christian pagans.

mountainman

Dear Doug,

Consider the testimony of independent eye-witnesses, perhaps under oath, in a case of crime, or of a highly unusual event (eg: UFO?). The separate accounts of these (lets say four) witnesses must necessarily vary, and I dont think we are arguing about this issue. As to the variance, let's take a simple event and/or crime being investigated by Elliot Ness and Hawaii Five Oh. Some witnesses will miss a few things that happened, while other witnesses will see things which didnt happen, and the whole range in between. Days after the event, witnesses may step forward and offer evidence which was not before mentioned which they remembered, which may or may not be true.

Elliot Ness and Hawaii Five Oh expect that witnesses to an event and/or crime will provide a range of testimony. Enter the sieve of Erastosthanes, and primitive proto-statistics, on the testimony of witnesses. The ancients were not unaware that there was always to be expected a necessary integrity issue in the correlation of independent reports, because such is entirely a natural phenoman. Enter the Eusebian canon tables as a calibration mechanism, to save the skeptics (like Elliott) from going through the exercise themselves.

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Dear Bones,

Did it ever live man? I expect a full medical report on the bridge in ten minutes. I got the bones of dead christian saints littering the time portal from the fourth century outwards, but do you think we can pick anything up on the scanners beyond the Nicaean cluster? On your way up the stairs tell Scotty ahead warp factor three hundred and eighteen. Oh, and Bones. Keep this hush hush ok. My long service leave is almost due. Over.

Best wishes from the Final Frontier.

Pete

J-D

Firstly, you have not presented any evidence that the ancients were aware of these issues relating to witness testimonies. There are many natural phenomena of which the ancients were unaware (no doubt there are natural phenomena of which nobody is aware today, although obviously we can't know what they are). Secondly, as somebody else has pointed out to you previously, the natural course for somebody creating fake testimony is to produce accounts each of which contain different material but not accounts which are flatly irreconcilable as the canonical Gospel accounts are. Thirdly, even if the accounts were reconcilable and it were possible that they were faked, there is still no evidence to give reason to think that they actually are fakes.

mountainman

Dear J-D,

I stated that these issues are naturally known to anyone who has experienced the necessity of attempting to collate witness testimony over a series of important events from a disparate group of witnesses with unknown integrity. Did the ancients have any form of witness testimonies? Of course they must have had. They had courts of law and they had the Praetorian Prefect. Therefore they had (experience in ) witness testimony.

Best wishes,


Pete

J-D

Yes, you did state that. That's assertion, not evidence.

mountainman

Dear J-D,

Are you claiming that these issues were not naturally known to people who served for examples for long periods in courts of law since at least the Gortys Law Codes were around (ie: third century BCE)? Do you think these issues were hiding from ancient intelligence?

Best wishes,


Pete