Ted Hoffman

Your caterogies are overlapping. I dont know how you apply this chronology. I asked for a list of what Eusebius forged and what he did not forge and you gave me four categories. These categories have overlapping chronologies. Now please show us how you delineate what Eusebius forged from what he did not. And explain how you do it.

mountainman

My criterion is to start with a postulate, hypothesis or claim (call it what you wish) in which nothing christian existed on the planet until the fourth century. Not all texts which we have today that mention christianity existed in the time of Eusebius, if the theses of Drews and before him Ross: TACITUS AND BRACCIOLINI: THE ANNALS FORGED IN THE 15th CENTURY" by JOHN WILSON ROSS (1818-1887), are accurate.

Conversely, there were texts forged by Eusebius in the 4th century which are no longer extant. But generally speaking, what you call my criterion is what I call the implications of the Eusebian fiction postulate: Eusebius lied about christian origins, and tendered legions of fictitious authors and their texts as part of the fabrication (of the Galilaeans -- according to Julian's phraseology).


I am following Drews et al (above). Conversely, Philosopher Jay may be correct when he claims Eusebius interploated Tacitus. Either way, we have no witnesses to the historicity of christian reference in the second century.


I call a claim an assertion, taken no further. A more specific claim to be used in the construction of a larger body of work I call an hypothesis, or a postulate. These I see as equivalent terms. The role of the postulate(s) is to form the basis of a theory in whatever field you are in. Mine is ancient history.

I call the Eusebian fiction postulate so because it is more than a claim. It is the foundation of a theory in ancient history summarised as "Constantine invented christianity". It is far more than a claim because I have personally examined and investigated scores and scored of archaeological citations (epigraphic and papyrii, etc) which appear to be at variance with the hypothesis. We may have discussed this evidentiary aspect before. Otherwise, an index is here


There are four directions and winds: north, west, south and east.
Constantine commanded the empire in the north, west, south and east.

Besides, the pagan ascetic academics (not christians!) who wrote
the apocryphal gospels, such as Thomas, Judas, etc complexified
the picture by their sedition against the canon.

Any military commander knows that 4 eyewitnesses are better than 3,
and that 4 eyewitness accounts will always vary by about 80%. If the
accounts are four copies of one original, someone would look stupid.
The Boss was not stupid. He was the Pontifex Maximus: the head of
the council of pontiffs from all religious cults in Rome. He wanted
to fabricate as much authenticity as possible, as is the modus operandi
of all good forgers, and enactors of fraudulent misrepresentation.



Pious fraud is trash. Fraudulent misrepresentation is trash.
This is a crime investigation, it is not textual criticism.
The field is ancient history; I am explicating the origins of
christianity as the political emergence of a top-down-emperor
cult in the fourth century; sponsored by imperial fraud.
The subject matter of the fraud is incidental to me.



Eusebian canon tables - Results 1 - 76 of 76 for "Eusebian canon tables". (0.32 seconds).

When you analyse these you will find approximately 600 odd atomic events and/or sayings shared in some cases by all 4, or 3 or 2 or 1 holy moly apostles of fiction. Eusebius claims to have developed these tables as a ready-reckoner quick-reference and look-up cross reference, about who said what, and who else also said what.

My point is that the Eusebian canon tables could have been constructed in the first instance, and the allocation of what each of the four authors was going to say, calculated in advance by authorship of the details in the control canon tables. Each author just gets the set of sayings and events decided in advance by the project coordinator, who keeps the management of the gospels in the canon tables. It may not have happened that way. I am just giving you a 'for instance'.


Eusebius tells us that he has retrieved the letter from the archives in Edessa. That he has the letter on his desk, and he reads it in the Syriac language. He tells us that it was authored by Jesus H himself. He personally translates the letter to Greek for our benefit. Dont you think this Eusebius bloke is really kind and generous? What would we all be doing without him? Eusebius tells me that Jesus was an author. Thus Jesus is in category ONE. (See above).



Eusebius forged all works by the authors in CATEGORY ONE. These are essentially all christians mentioned by Eusebius in his works who died between the first century and the council of Nicaea.

The authors in CATEGORY TWO have no idea christianity ever existed. They are pagans who lived sometime in the first three centuries and who died before Nicaea.

The authors in other categories wrote and died after Nicaea. Does this explain the analysis?

Eusebius is responsible for fabricating all his sources found in Ecclesiastical History and In Preparation for the Bullshit. Heggesipus, Tertullian and Justin Martyr are Eusebius. Origen's NT texts are Eusebius. (Origen's OT texts are Origen). Porphyry and Celsus "Against the Dingbats" is Eusebius. (Constantine order Eusebius to forge Porphyry, so that the Boss could stand up and wave the writings around in the air, and then condemn the writings of Porphyry.

It was all politically expedient at the time.

Constantine also probably sponsored the bulk of the Historia Augusta, and probably tried to pass it off as the profane side of history in parallel to Eusebius newly invented historiography.

Doug Shaver

From what evidence do you infer that postulate?

Let me be specific about what I mean. What fact, not in serious dispute among qualified historians, is inconsistent with a denial of your postulate?

Sheshbazzar

A short observation about this.
Those who have carefully followed Mountainman's extensive posts on "The Eusebian Postulate", are aware that "Eusebius" would not even need be an actual "historical" person for thesis of "The Eusebian Postulate" to still be true.
The essential premise being that the corpus of "Christian" literature, its "history", and its claims, were all forged in the 4th century under the demand and direction of Emperor Constantine.
If this was accomplished in an "Eusebian scriptorium" as Mountainman has previously termed it, that would imply only that Eusebius had oversight of a group of writers, not that he himself would have need be the one penning every word, they would have been be set to task under Imperial order to crank out volumes of religious texts, to be edited and adapted by Eusebius, subjected to final approval by Boss Constantine.
And, if the name "Eusebius" was revealed to be no more than a nom de plume used by other writer(s) in a 4th century forgery mill to perpetrate a fraud, that would in no manner discredit "The Eusebian Postulate",
No, rather it would only establish all the more firmly the truth that such forgery did take place.

mg01

Time and time again I find issues where the NIV chooses alternate translations to gloss and even disguise "difficult" suituations. In following the above article, two of the examples cited are covered up in the NIV version. If you look at the blue letter bible site and compare translations between Luke 5:18 and 5:21 with respect to the issues raised in the article it's pretty obvious the NIV committee knew exactly what they were doing with their word choice. I've run across literally dozens of these but so many are piling up now I really wish I'd started a list.

I switched to using the RSV a while back specifically because of these issues, but I still have NIV texts that would be too difficult to transition my embedded notes.

mountainman

A postulate is a "given" and does not require "evidence" as such, only two things: 1) it is falsifiable, and 2) it is not contradicted by evidence. I have spent considerable time covering any perceived contradictions in the evidence here.


Would you please rephrase this? Do you mean consistent with a denial of the postulate? If this is what you mean, see the index of "facts" above. If you mean how can the postulate be falsified, then one pre-Constantinian C14 dating on NT literature would give the postulate a good shake. So far, this has not been forthcoming.

However if you mean what evidence have I tendered in support of the postulate, which is available to all historians, then I have a list of citations from the fourth century on which evidence the notion that people thought the new testament literature was to be associated with fiction:

* the words of Arius
* the convictions of Emperor Julian
* the observations of Nestorius.
* the nature of the Origenist Controversy.
* the nature of 4th/5th century "heresies"
* the nature of 4th/5th century "anathemas"
* the Apocrypha as a seditious polemical reaction to Bullneck's Canon.

See: www.mountainman.com.au/essenes




Best wishes,


Pete Brown

mountainman

Thanks for your support Sheshbazzar. It's been pretty much all the way uphill these last few years, with a few notable exceptions here and there.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

patcleaver

Please start a list.

There is no such thing as direct translations. The translator uses a source language Lexicon, and possibly some grammar rules, to determine the words and structure of the original text, usually in a non-native language. Then he decides what it means in view of his biases. Then he writes what he thinks it means in his own language.

The lexicons and grammar rules are based on the biases of the person who developed the lexicon and the grammar rules. They are mostly based in the Septuagint even though that was probably corrupted by Jerome. None of the ones used for Bible Translation are based on extra-biblical writings because that would not conform to their theological biases.

The Bible Study literature is full of articles concerning how to justify translating Hebrew and Greek to fit Christian theological biases.

There are lots of forums and blogs discussing mistranslations in the KJB and NIV bibles as part of the fundamentalist bible wars.

"TRUTH IN TRANSLATION: ACCURACY AND BIAS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT (or via: amazon.co.uk)" Author: Jason David BeDuhn he compares various Bible translations to the Greek for accuracy. He says, most of the time the NWT is the most accurate, but he has an appendix explaining why Yahweh should not be translated into Jehovah.

In Hebrew, the first line of Geneses says "the gods made heaven and earth" - there is no monotheism or creation in Geneses. Then the same word is translated messiah in possible prophesies about Jesus, but for everyone else its translated as anointed.

The Greek NT does not say anywhere that Jesus was crucified. It says he was staked (either hung on a pole or staked to the ground) Crucifixion is something Jerome invented when he translated the Greek NT into Latin.

The only version that we have of the Septuagint contains Christian interpolations. Nobody even knows when "young women" became "virgin".

patcleaver

What do you mean by "qualified historians"?

Anyone who can not overcome their biases to seek the truth, is of course unqualified. Yet almost everyone specializing in this area is a Christian who is incapable of overcoming their biases.

MarkA

This is very interesting indeed.

I was aware of the young women to virgin change but not of the no crucifixion in the Greek NT. Do other contemporary Greek sources use another word for the Roman practice? I am not a linguist so please reply in a way that a lay person can understand.

I was also aware of the Hebrew word messiah meaning annointed but not that it was deliberately used only in translation in the way you describe. If this is true you must do an analysis of the texts. Such a deliberate and planned deception should be exposed immediately.

Did you mean to say that the correct translation of the Genesis passage is gods not god? Please do a simple to understand explanation of this.

If what you say is verifiable this amounts to a conspiracy. A conspiracy that is actually true is a rarity but when it happens it usually leads to a definitive shift in any system.