mountainman

Dont worry. Be happy! How does one embed an audi-clip?

The apparent Megiddo structure exception

This page lines up an interesting collation of opinion concerning
the dating of the Megiddo complex. Here is the URL:
http://home.planet.nl/~slofs018/Megiddo.htm#Datering

Here is a brief quote of an opinion supporting my side of the ledger.

Joe Zias is an anthropologist and a former curator with the IAA, so he is a predecessor of mr Tepper. He doubts the dating "third century". There is no evidence for churches before the 4th century AD (Constantine and Byzantine age), he says. [But: see 3.1, nr 10]. As a matter of fact, Christianity was disallowed inthese days, and a Roman officer (like Gaianos in 1.3 and 2.4.3) wouldn't be so foolish as to make himself known as a Christian. [But: see Philip Harland 2003 on Christians in the pro-Constantine age.] Perhaps the building had been in use in earlier date [as a "Roman" buiding, Zias in °NYT], but not as a church. As a church it could date back to the 4th century, like other churches in the region. (Zias in °CO.)

The apparent Dura-Europa structure exception

We have covered this. The inference that this "house church"
is christian is drawn from a picture on the wall and some graffitti.
But who is the art expert drawing the inference.




Best wishes,



Pete Brown
www.mountainman.com.au

Gamera

No evidence here or elsewhere that Constantine played any role in any of the deliberations of the counsel.

Further, you need to establish when these accounts were written. If they were not contemporaneous, then it's possible that the Nicean counsel never occured, but rather was a fabrication of later counsels, trying to convince people that the Nicean counsel forged documents.

That's how self-defeating your arguments are.

So step one for you is: Give us a list of the MSS that support your claims about the counsel and Constantines role in it, and then give us the dates of those MSS so they can be evaluated using the same criteria you have established for evaluating early Christian MSS.

We're all on tenterhhooks.

spin

I come back to DeForest Kelley, the long suffering Dr McCoy of the original Star Trek, who once said, "there are only so many ways you can say that," referring to the necessity for him to say in most episodes "he's dead, Jim."

Jobar

Well, the epistles of Paul (assuming of course they aren't forged) contain many doctrines that would fill the bill, I think.

But you do see that you can't require *all* NT doctrines to be believed by any single pre-Nicean church, don't you? After all, the NT didn't even exist prior to Nicea- save as dispersed writings held in many places, by many different churches. All that you can fairly ask is that those churches thought of themselves as followers of Jesus the Christ, and believed things we of today would recognize as being Christian or proto-Christian.

As I say, I'm far from being the Biblical scholar many of those who post here are. I'm only judging by the writings in this thread, and others where you've expressed your hypothesis. All I'm trying to do here is to give you and the other experts a reality check, from someone who has no dog in this fight.

But even if you're mistaken, I think your questions are ones that we need to ask. I know that I've learned a lot from following this dispute, and for that I thank you and your opponents too!

mountainman

The hypothesis, which to date has stood the test of consistency
with what scantly records of the past, and what scantly C14 results
of the present are available to me, is outlined in a schematic here:
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/article_010.htm

The traditionally accepted references to christians represented in the
new (and strange) testament, the gospels, the acts of the apostles,
the inter-office-memo's and letters of unknown bishops of wherever,
the gnostic christian literature, the tell-tale calumnifying literature of
supposed independent christian apologists of antiquity are all represented
in the above schematic as little yellow boxes.

While scholars have had a field day putting each of these little yellow
boxes at the atomic level of this christian "patristic literature" to the
stress test of historical integrity, and found them very very wanting,
our hypothesis instead considers the whole package as one.

We consider, with Julian, that the entire package is a fiction
of men composed by wickedness. So yes, Paul is a fiction, or
a forgery, however you might wish to term it.

I dont believe there was even one single pre-Nicaean church.
The whole phenomenom known as "christianity" was kick-started
at the level of the Roman empire with immediate effect at the Council
of Nicaea in 325 CE, after a brief beta-site in Rome under Constantine
during the lead up period 312-324 CE.

Our hypothesis considers that the NT did not exist at all until the 4th CE.
That it was fabricated in the fourth century out of the whole cloth.
That Julian made an expedient testimony to this historical event.

I appreciate your forthright objectivity, and dialogue.
Thanks for your comments to date.

We are all students of life first.
In the second instance we choose other disciplines to explore.
There may be need for multi-disciplinary studies.
In fact, specialisation today sometimes imposes intellectual blinkers,
and contains emergent thought into predefined boundaries.

I also share your gratitude in this learning process, in interaction
and in formulating questions, and answers to questions, in this forum.

Best wishes for now,



Pete Brown
www.mountainman.com.au

mountainman

Constantine was the supreme imperial mafia thug
who forced the new and strange religion down the
throat of the Hellenic culture until
the highways were full of galloping bishops

Julian was the young supreme imperial Hellenic philosopher
who wrote, within 40 years of the Nicaean council:

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.






Pete Brown
www.mountainman.com.au

spin

Still waiting for mountainman to face the fact that two churches in two different locations falsify his theory. He has to dispute the findings of two groups of archaeologists who produce datings based on archaeology. And Joe Zias, who is a specialist in ancient bones, is of little importance in the issue of the Megiddo find.

mountainman

Still waiting for spin to face the fact that it is not the existence
of the Dura-Europa "house church" and the Megiddo "church"
which may falsify the theory.

Falsification of the theory relies upon establishing that these
so-called churches, or in the case of Dura-Europa, "house-church",

1) were christian, and
2) were in use and dated to the pre-Nicaean epoch.

In respect of the Dura-Europa house church, neither of the
above claims are supported conclusively by the evidence.

In respect of the Megiddo site, the inscription is clearly
related to christianity, so 1) is OK, but 2) is not, because
there is no agreement in the dating yet for Megiddo, and
there has been no parallel independent C14 results for
the site yet published. OPinion is recent, and divided.


Therefore, I can retire at present with a reasonable sense
that my theory is not refuted by your two archeological
citations at the present state of knowledge about them.

The troublesome thing is however spin, from your perspective,
is that these two citations are very recent and new,
within the last 100 years.

If were having this conversation 100 years ago, what
archeological evidence would have been available???




Pete Brown
www.mountainman.com.au

spin

I can understand you refusing the scholarship on both counts. They both invalidate your theory, so you dispute them. That's logical. All you have to do is deal with the findings. Both have clear datings from their archaeological contexts. The one related to a historical event, the Sassanid siege of Dura-Europos, the other to pottery finds on the floor with christian mosaics. And do you really need to quibble about the iconography?

darstec

Yale Divinity School in the 1930s. That certainly sounds like an unbiased source.