mountainman

Or a text that said that Jesus was the result of a Roman soldier raping Mary while she had her period?

Or a text that said the Infant Jesus was a malevolent trickster wizard?

Or a text that said the adult Jesus pulled a woman out of his side and madly fucked her in the presence of Mary somewhere up a mountain?

Or a series of texts that said that the Apostles travelled hither and thither on "bright clouds"?

Or a series of texts that said that the Apostles "drew lots" to divide up the nations between themselves?




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

Isn't that where Celsus fits in?


Origen the Christian (not Origen the Platonist) via Eusebius.




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Duvduv

I have said previously that I am suspicious that the Toldoth Yeshu text(s), although based on the information in the Talmud were not written by Jews. So now that you mention it, could it have served to lampoon the official religion "on behalf" of Jews, as confused and anachronistic as the Toldoth is?

Ever since you proposed the idea of lampooning I have been thinking about this in terms of the non-canonical "heretical" texts.

lpetrich

Celsus the First Nietzsche

A few centuries later, historian Ammianus Marcellinus found Xian doctrinal disputes boring and wrote very little about them.

mountainman

I have already pointed out that there was no sense of any outward political heresy in the epoch before Constantine. We have orthodox operatives visiting the public libraries of so-called heretics and borrowing their books. The orthodox and the heretical Christians, if they existed at all, co-existed within the empire.

The political appearance of heretics explodes when Constantine raises the bible (LXX plus NT) to the status of holy writ of the pagan Roman Empire. It is therefore totally obvious to me anyway that the pagans reacted to this constraint by lampooning the books of the LXX and NT.

There is little evidence if any to support the possibility that most (if not all) of both the Old Testament and New Testament non canonical books could not have been authored as late as the epoch immediately following Constantine's supremacy and his statement of agenda with respect to making the Bible the holy writ of the hitherto pagan empire.

The Toldoth Yeshu is a classic example of what may be pagan satire against the imperial agenda of Constantine. It is a hard hitting text that portrays Christian origins as being the result of the rape of a Roman soldier. The political situation c.325 CE with respect to the pagan identity was exactly that. Namely Constantine's so-called "Christian soldiers" were destroying the pagan temples and executing the pagan priesthood.

Here is a quote from Momigliano about heresy:

We can see that Eusebius is vitally concerned with political heresy, and we can see that he boldly attempts to assert that this heresy was present in the "Early Church" before the arrival of the centralised monotheistic state cult under Constantine. But this assertion is without any evidence, since he tells us that the so-called orthodox and so-called heretics coexisted with their own libraries.

The greatest heresy against Constantine's agenda was unbelief. Which self respecting pagan in the right mind would not laugh out loud at the stories in the Constantine Bible as fitting for a holy writ of the pagan empire?

Biblical scholars cannot laugh at Jesus. They have been trained and psychologically conditioned that one cannot laugh out loud at Jesus, since the Jesus story is itself is utterly humourless, and their tenure constrains them to preserve the humourless praise of the Jesus figure.


Biblical scholars are therefore ill equipped to recognise the signature of humor in the form of satire and parody against the orthodox stories, and the history of the authorship of these stories. Hence the political reaction to the bible from the Nicaean generation of pagan authors is shrouded in a heresy which is today not understood for what it is: lampooning in the political sense.

"the sacred matters of inspired teaching
were exposed to the most shameful ridicule
in the very theaters of the unbelievers.

How Controversies originated at Alexandria
through Matters relating to Arius
Eusebius, "Life of Constantine", Ch. LXI

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Clivedurdle

I think Tom Holland in the Shadow of the Sword indirectly discusses the invention and evolution of Heresy. Might Islam be the most heresyphobic religion?

Iconoclasm?

Has the concept of heresy now spread everywhere? Is it related to individualisation?

Duvduv

It is interesting that for all the alleged writings prior to the 4th century against and about heretics to an official "church," according to "Eusebius", the alleged Nicaean Council of 325 invited all "bishops" regardless of whether they were "heretics" or not. Presumably the official church that existed allegedly since the writings of second century "Irenaeus," if not before, should have taken for granted that only the kosher bishops should be invited.

For that matter, one could ask how any of Constantine's children could have belonged to a heretical movement that had been condemned by the Nicaean Council years after Christian writers had allegedly told the world (or at least the literati in the world) the difference between proper Christianity and "heretical" movements.

mountainman

Islam used the blueprint of Nicaean Christianity, in which the notion of heresy and orthodoxy was used as a political tool to conform the centralised monotheistic state cult. It denigrated Christianity by incorporating the books of the heretics.

It is now, but in the past Christianity exceeded it.

Constantine engaged in the deliberate destruction within a culture of the culture's own religious icons and other symbols or monuments, for religious or political motives. So YES.

Probably. It has been attenuated because the power of the churches has waned.




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia