mountainman

That is correct.

Nobody is likely to try and argue otherwise.

The C14 date was provided in order to provide one item of chronological evidence that Christianity is most likely to have appeared before the 5th century. There is other corroborative evidence - the Nag Hammadi codices are dated according to their cartonage to the mid 4th century, and some of the earliest complete bible codices (Vaticanus etc) are also dated to the 4th century.

This evidence seems to rule out a 5th century start.

I was responding to the OP:


The UPPER BOUND for Christian origins is the 4th century.

(This rules out the theories for an origin after the 4th century, and there have been a few of these.)

The evidence supported options are therefore century 1, 2, 3 or 4

If you are ruling out century 1, then all that remains is century 2, 3 or 4.

spin

:hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse:

Mountainman is skirting directives on the issue of his falsified theory concerning a late origin for christianity. But, as was long ago pointed out, the christian baptistry at Dura Europos, securely dated by the fall and destruction of the city of Dura, belongs to the middle of the third century, not the fourth. He has tried to attack the baptistry claiming that the archaeologists were biased (seriously!) and he's tried to claim that the frescoes didn't represent christian motifs.

On a wider note he has denied that any of the second and third century church fathers either were christian or where necessary, real. He has denied the palaeographical analyses of ancient Greek that allows the dating of texts through the forms of handwriting in them. He has denied that Arius was even christian, the religionist responsible for the dissension among church fathers concerning the divine nature of Jesus. His view of christianity was born out of the brain of Eusebius and was straightaway fraught with the heresy that Jesus was not of the same substance as god, a view zealously supported by Constantine's children to the extent of their persecuting trinitarians.

Mountainman is a little like Frankenstein, having created this monster he's stuck with feeding it.

:hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse: :hobbyhorse:

stephan huller

There has to be a reasonable limit on the number of pieces of evidence you can ignore to justify a theory.

mountainman

The OP includes consideration of a date c.400 CE to which above I have responded with evidence ruling out such a late (upper bound) date. I made it quite clear I was dealing with upper bounds and not lower bounds. Obviously I was not clear enough.

The claim was that these people were "wearing Christian glasses".
The claim was that this bias is as a result of their conditioned intellectual and conceptual framework.
Yale Divinity College representatives were not going out there to Dura on the Persian border to find evidence of Manichaeism.


You and others are quite free to identify these murals as unambiguously Christian.

Whether this permits you to undertake character assassinations against those who don't agree with your opinion is another matter.

mountainman

Many people including most tenured academics of theological colleges and biblical seminaries still think that Christianity started with Jesus and his Greek writing "fishermen" Apostles in the first century. How many pieces of evidence have to be ignored to seriously contemplate the origins of Christianity in the 2nd century, and what are those pieces of evidence? The evidence does speak to us directly. (Perhaps it speaks directly to the Biblical Scholars).

Evidence has to be interpreted - usually within a framework. The traditional framework is the chronology of a Historical Jesus in the 1st century as has been promoted by the church since Nicaea. That is to say, all people must make hypotheses about what the evidence actually represents. It should therefore never be ignored, but it may be reinterpreted - with respect to another alternative framework. (E.g. See Detering)

TedM

One approach to honing in on the date of origin that might be fruitful is to identify the MOST LIKELY interpolations, and see if they fit a pattern that can explain WHY the passage was interpolated. Does that reason point to a truth that is trying to be covered up or 'corrected'?

spin

Your taking it as a pretext is transparent.

French archaeologists, a great Russian scholar, a great Mithraic scholar, all singed by your burning desire to avoid the inevitable fact that your nonsense is falsified.

Christ waking on water, women at the tomb, the (Samaritan) woman at the well, the healing of the paralytic, then figures from the Hebrew bible, Adam & Eve, David and Goliath, and in the context of all of these the good shepherd.

Oh and of course the 3" x 3" fragment of a gospel conflation.

It's dead, Jim. Please stop the voodoo.

mountainman

This is the first time I have made the point that there is abundant evidence to refute any theory claiming Christian origins after 400 CE, such as those for example of Jean Hardouin, Edwin Johnson and others.




Scholars have made erroneous claims in the past about the identification of artefacts and therefore there is no reason to throw away scepticism when dealing with the sole exemplar of the so called "Christian House-Church".

I really don't understand your lack of scepticism.

The earliest artistic impressions of the Canonical Jesus?

On the Persian border? Not in Rome or Alexandria or Antioch?



Dura Europos was vastly multi-cultural. Such claims have been made. But are they valid claims? Has anyone for example considered and examined the evidence against these claims, or have they been uncritically accepted?



None of which are necessarily and/or unambiguously related to the Christian mission.



This item of evidence was found under the earthen slope which covered the so called "Christian house-church" and the Jewish synagogue. It could have been left there in the mid 4th century when the entire Roman army passed through Dura (perhaps twice). We know there were Christians in the army under Julian.


Dura Parchment 24


Don't you think it is curious that the text twice agrees with Codex Vaticanus and Bohairic against everything else?



Bones, we have no Klingon churches on the scanners, and we have no Klingon "church houses" on the scanners - anywhere in the galaxy. Suddenly we find what Mission Control wants to call the one and only ever detected "Klingon 'house church'", the sole exemplar of Klingon archaeology in the galaxy.


And the earliest portrait of the Chief Klingon Jet Jesus Jackson?

What would Spock say?

spin

He would just give you a Vulcan neck-pinch to avoid further vain noise from you.

tanya

You are referring to a basin, for water, in a building, formerly a HOUSE, situated in the Syrian Desert, adjacent to a Jewish synagogue.

1. Do the Jews not use water, both for cleaning themselves, and for symbolic ceremonies?

2. If you were living in that house, even if only as a visitor, having arrived by a long, and dusty overland voyage, whether from East, or West, would you not seek to wash your hands and face, in such a basin?

3. Is there no archaeological evidence showing similar basins in any other dwellings of Dura Europos? Is this one dwelling so unique, with respect to the presence of a basin to hold water? Does the archaeological evidence support the notion that this basin was ADDED to the house, uniquely, AFTER it became a "Christian" house-church? How would we know, looking at this excavation, that the Jews had not used this building, proximate to the synagogue, as a guest house, for visiting Jewish religious leaders traveling between Baghdad and Jerusalem? Do the current generation of Jewish scholars ignore the hostilities that had erupted between the Christians (aka blasphemous, pagan, heathen) and the Jews, elsewhere in the empire? What, we should imagine that uniquely in Dura Europos, the Jews welcomed the Christians as occupants of their former guest house?

4. Are you not puzzled, spin, or at least minimally skeptical, of the identification of a Diatessaron fragment from the rubbish collected, (discovered as if by chance), despite Clark Hopkins' numerous explanations of his frustrations with the disintegration of SIMILAR papyrus documents. Why did this one fragment survive? One reason may be, that the diatessaron fragment was placed, or deposited, or dropped, in a DIFFERENT location, from the one where reams of documents were found, only to vanish before the explorer's eyes, turned into dust, before anything could be deciphered.

Mountainman's gentle reminder of Emperor Julian's troops, passing down the Euphrates river en route to attack the Persian Army in their camp, near the mesopotamian capital, is prescient, and deserves a more careful assessment, than your abrupt dismissal, spin.

Dura Europos was ROME's outpost, it was the Emperor's LOSS, when it fell. Julian, most certainly, would have stopped, if only to seek shelter from the hail of arrows launched from the Eastern bank of the Euphrates. Why wouldn't those soldiers, many of whom, doubtless had grandfathers who had perished there, want to excavate a bit of the old city. When they did, why couldn't they have DEPOSITED, not simply extracted, souvenirs of one sort or another? The Diatessaron would have been the single most logical document in possession of these Greek-Syrian Christian soldiers. Julian himself, may have been a skeptic, but those soldiers had been exposed to half a century of indoctrination, including the idea that Christianity represented the official STATE religion.

Filling in the 4th century, newly excavated, abandoned outpost, would not have been necessary, for the city to fill up again with dirt, a result of repeated desert wind storms, during the next 1500 years until the French excavation in the 1920's.