Clouseau

Nonsense. Historians are very reluctant indeed to say what people actually believed unless they show by their actions that they believed something, and even then one cannot always be certain. The opposition of others, who might also have been lying, is quite irrelevant.

It is preposterous to use even a recognised modern scholar as sure evidence of the falsity or truth of an ancient document, who, paradoxically, may know more about what went on than contemporaries. What one can say about the Bible is that those who were likely to have had vested interests in refuting it, i.e. the Jewish leadership and the imperial and patrician interests before Constantine, as well as Greek philosophers, were unable to do so. It was they who had to adapt to the Bible, one devious way or another.

Absurdity. Naming names proves nothing.

Because Christianity was illegal. Don't you read threads?

Chili

[QUOTE=Clouseau;4537434]I'd be careful writing that because most atheists here were once what you are now. There is very few Catholic atheists because the RCC doesn't owe its members very much since they do not lead them into the perversion that you call Christian. So yes, anti Christian they are if you think you are one.

Chili

Witchcraft was illegal.

mountainman

It allows a student of ancient history to postulate
a theory of antiquity in which the prenicene epoch
was "christian free". This alternative history sees
the invention of christianity as having been a fourth
century political phenomenom.


I read both threads and their common profiles.

Ancient history and modern history show many precedents
for the publication --- underground, grass roots, etc ---
of "illegal" texts. However the facts remains that there
were scores of "christian bishops" and other authors in
a position to clearly be able to publish their own texts.

We have Eusebius to thank for gethering them!

Why if these bishops published their own texts, and at the
same time transmit both the Hebrew text and the NT text
to their survivors, would they not have at one time taken
the expedience of binding them?

Why was Constantine the first to bind them together?
Inspector Clouseau, and the ever present Kato, can you
answer this most pressing question upon my mind?

Doug Shaver

How do you know they couldn't refute it?

Obviously, they failed to convince Christians that the Bible was untrue. Is that suppose to prove that their arguments were worthless?

Clouseau

Was that Julian's hypothesis? Did anyone suggest that?

Then your question is an odd one.

What at first sight is remarkable is that these people were able to publish at all at a time when Christianity was illegal. Almost nothing survives from the period that was not written by a monarchical bishop. Now monarchical bishops are unknown in the NT. Such a man is much more easily controlled by an emperor than the democratic congregations of the synagogues on which church polity was modelled. None of their writings was accepted as canonical, despite the late canonization performed by the emperor's 'church', despite the reliance of the emperor's church on those documents to justify its very existence.

One cannot be sure that he was. One had to be very wealthy just to possess all the individual 'books' that made up the OT and NT. One had to keep secret the fact that one possessed them. Constantine had neither of these limitations. And even when he had 'published' the whole Bible, possession of it must have been a rare event.

This thread is concerned with publication, but publication was not the essential that it is regarded as today. Until the advent of printing, oral transmission was much more common, and the mere collection and presentation of the already circulating books of the Bible into a single physical object was a relatively minor matter. It told no-one what they did not know already, except that the empire had at last conceded, nominally, anyway.

Today, those who call themselves Christians are in remarkable agreement as to the limits of the New Testament canon; they agree on that, despite disagreement on almost everything else. One may suppose that the same recognition was made among the persecuted silent majority of early Christians who forced the emperors to abandon use of their gods, such useful tools in population control. So Constantine's publication is likely to be of very little significance in any respect.

mountainman

No, he stated the following:

It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind
the reasons by which I was convinced that
the fabrication of the Galilaeans
is a fiction of men composed by wickedness.

In other words, he was there in 362 CE and obviously
wrote his treatise because of his convictions. It was
not a hypothesis for Julian, but a cold political and
historical fact.

Clouseau

Then it's irrelevant.

mountainman

Hard and cold political and historical facts
are irrelevant for some profiles but not all.

Such is the difference between being a
student of ecclesiastical history, and a
student of ancient history.

Clouseau

Keep studying.