mountainman

The text is clearly extra canonical or non canonical and Eusebius sees himself as the champion of canonical orthodoxy. Suddenly an unofficial version of Jesus Story is in circulation. How can he protect the canonical orthodoxy? By pronouncing the text to be blasphemous "in all ways."


Why are you assuming a Christian authored the text before Eusebius when Eusebius tells us it was being used politically against the orthodox christians by the pagan majority?



The entire narrative is an elaborate artificially contrived clone Jesus story based upon Eusebius's set of Canonical Jesus Stories. The organisation that is faithfully preserving the set of Canonical Jesus Stories now has a major integrity problem. WTF are they going to do about these "Other Jesus Story Books"?



The mass resurrection scenario involving the zombie scribes is a parody of Matthew 27. We all know about the Michael Licona Constroversy. It's a very sensitive issue. The obvious solution to test is one involving parody at the source.

Dont forget this is equivalent to a political war about canonical books.






The unofficial and quite possibly pagan author is speaking to the entire Roman populace on behalf of Pilate on behalf of Jesus. Anyone learning this bit of the text at school would remember that Jesus heals by the old god.

To the canonical orthodox this is heresy.


No it is not crazy. Eusebius was supposed to be in charge of - we might even say the editor-in-chief of canonical orthodoxy.

Eusebius rejects the canonical authenticity of the "Acts of Pilate" which he claims suddenly appeared c.312 CE.





That's a modern misconception.

Toto

Pete - in the interests of preserving what might be left of my sanity, I will not respond except to note my complete disagreement with your conclusions and your use of your time.

mountainman

Toto - all I am doing is questioning the logic of mainstream's conclusions and offering in this case a far simpler alternative, and I do not see this as a waste of the use of my time.

DCHindley

I'm a little surprised that you don't see past Eusebius' motives for discrediting Maximinus' Acta Pilati. He explains his dismissal of them as:

1) Wrong on account of chronological discrepencies between them and what was found in many/most copies of Josephus Antiquities, and

2) Clumsy fabrications created by over-zealous city fathers and emperor cult priests seeking favor from the emperor of their region.

In short, nothing better than the kind of clumsy pandering attack ads and stump speaches uttered by certain US politicians. Maybe, but just as we can compare these kind of claims to independent evidence (televised TV speeches and interviews, business tax filings that indicate ownership and owner/officers/partners, officially released birth certificates, etc), so can we find cracks in Eusebius' cases if we look hard and think "outside the box."

Yes, the Blackwell Companion. The papyri remains are skewed towards Egyptian trash dumps simply because they offered ideal conditions (buried in dry sand) for survival.

Or maybe his official "acta" submitted to Vitellius, the new legate of Syria, didn't match up with testimony presented by Jewish/Samaritan embassies complaining about the arbitrariness of his actions. If you need an excuse for how such Acta, if real, could have ended up in Syrian government archives in Antioch, there it is.

That being said, I don't mean to imply that Pilate's official Acta of Jesus' trial would have been "true." Also, I don't think it is likely that Pilate antedated entries to before he even started his governorship there.

"Cruelty" is an exaggeration. He was a military man, and most likely wanted to present himself in a position of strength. The Judeans initiated protests of civil disobediance that Pilate could not excuse use of deadly action against, as his mission was not passification but tax gathering, so he relented and more than likely switched to compromising with the "leading citizens." Even when you communicate and try to come to compromises, sometimes conflicts remain. Appropriating money from the Temple's Corban account to defray expenses for the Aquaduct that would benefit both the Temple (lustrations, cleaning up, washing blood and entrails down the sewers, etc) as well as the civilian population/soldiers in the Antonia fortress. Perhaps this latter class of beneficiaries was beyond the scope of what the Temple authorities believed the Corban was set up for, Pilate, as the prefect, was entitled to the last say in such matters, and he exercised his authority accordingly.

Doesn't Potter's Companion also say, speaking of the imperial Prefect's equestrian in charge of the idios logos [responsible for the emperor's financial interests]:

The implications of the records of this official for our understanding of not only Egypt under Roman rule, but potentially for the Roman state as a whole, are far-reaching, since the picture that we get would tend to undermine the standard view that the Roman state was uninterested in local administration.

also

The Roman interest in preserving records of every transaction is revealed clearly at the village level of administration. For instance, several surviving rolls from the village registry office of Tebtunis (the only local archive of which part has survived!), dating some 50 years before the edict of Mettius Rufus, show that his instructions about how summaries of transactions should be recorded in the local offices followed a standard Roman practice that was in use well before his time (P.Mich. II).

Since only one official archive has been identified through archeology and what remained were bits of carbonized rolls, we really don't know what records they contained (varying by type of archive) or for how long they were kept. However, since the majority of surviving records are technically private collections of excerpts drawn from the archives (dossiers), they may end up in the dump when they become no longer relevant to the family, official or individuals who collected them (death, changed circumstances, etc). As for the two rather long rolls of village transactions, so they got junked. The datable trash spans several centuries. We cannot determine how long they remained in storage before they were deemed irrelevant.

DCH

stephan huller

Very interesting DCH

mountainman

How far "outside the box" are we willing to explore?

What are the limits?

A pagan reaction to the canonical Jesus Story was authored during the early 4th century according to Eusebius, and it was blasphemous in all ways.

Inside the box we are conjecturing that Constantine sought out and destroyed this text, sometime between 325 and 337 CE, which had earlier been given to pagan schoolchildren to read as exercises.

After this date, still well inside the box, we are conjecturing that another less blasphemous in all ways text called "The Acts of Pilate" was authored by the Christians, and this is the one we are looking at.

I do not comprehend how a Christian author was comfortable with the politics of Jesus healing by the power of the God Asclepius. A Christian author would never write this. The text before us is more reasonably seen as being authored by a clever pagan writing a Mills and Boon version of the Jesus Story which Constantine published.

If Eusebius were to have written that the pagan authorship which he described as happening c.312 actually took place c.325 CE, then maybe I'd believe him. The victor falsely retrojects the war of codices of that epoch.

Too far outside the box?

Time will tell ...

stephan huller

God. Like a broken record

LegionOnomaMoi

No it isn't...it isn't...it isn't...it isn't...it isn't...


"Sorry squire, I scratched the record..."
"Sorry squire, I scratched the record..."
"Sorry squire, I scratched the record..."
"Sorry squire, I scratched the record..."

ad infinitum

tanya

Thanks for sharing this thought, Pete, your ideas are appreciated, and well received by those with a tiny bit more imagination than the scratchy record types on the forum.

I would argue, against your position, that Christianity adopted much of Asclepius, as the Jesus story evolved. The ancient jewish tradition ("chosen people") is clearly repudiated by the storyline, as the nascent christian tradition expanded to embrace all kinds of "heathen", with a change in emphasis from family/clan/village to individual.

LegionOnomaMoi

Eusbeius' motives are irrelevant. Christians backed at least one version which waqs pro-christian, and apparently sought to discredit another. However, the probability that such a document ever existed is very slight, and the probability that it survived beyond a few years (let alone centuries) would make it something of a miracle. Of course, if it is genuine, then we have Pilate as a witness to Jesus.


The reason Eisler is alone here has nothing to do with Eusebius' argument, but (among other things) the probability that any such document by Pilate ever existed, let alone survived.


What Companion? The issues I refer to can be found in everything from Rethinking Gnosticism to Metzger's book on textual criticism. However, these barely scratch the surface. For detailed accounts of various aspects of the language, creation, style, and nature of the papryi we have e.g., Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography, The Language of the Payprie, Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome/, the series New Documents Illustrating Christianity, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A Study of the Origins of its Development from the Eighth to the Fifth Centuries B.C., and many more (that is, many more of those I own, as obviously that set is nothing compared to the complete set of texts dealing with this issue). Don't get me wrong: the companions are usually pretty good if one is starting out in a given field or is looking for good references, but I don't know which one you are referring to here.

As for "survival", the "ideal conditions" wouldn't matter if people cared to preserve such texts. They didn't.

I don't need an excuse. I can make up plenty like the above. The problem isn't the inability to make-up explanations for the survival of such a text, but the baseless assumptions such explanations use or rely on. For example: the existence of the "Jewish/Samaritan embassies complaining," the idea that Pilate would ever have felt the slightest bit compelled to write such a document, the idea that some disparity between this imaginary document and an imaginary Jewish complaint would have mattered to Vitellius, the improbability that even if all that was necessary for such a document to be written and sent anywhere it would have survived, and so on.

Yet despite prefects before him and procurators after, he somehow seems to have gained such a reputation. Explaining it away via his relation to the Roman military doesn't help.

Such protests were going on well over 100 years before Pilate was born. Again, despite frequent uprisings, discontent, etc., Pilate stands out.

What compromises/communications are you referring to?



Oh right. I forgot about referring to that. In any case, as I said earlier, it's not that records didn't exist. We have clay records which survive thanks to war. It's whether these records were considered worth keeping, and whether Pilate would have been likely to write the document in question. We have ample evidence that official documents, from reciepts to proclamations, existed. We also have evidence that nobody cared to preserve them. And we don't have evidence that Pilate would likely create the document in question.


This isn't true at all. First, we have direct and indirect references and quotations from official documents in surviving texts. Second, that "one official archive" is only true for Egyptian governance. Third, we have other papyri and epigraphical evidence.

All records seem to have quickly become "no longer relevant" to anyone.

We can actually determine length in many cases, albeit approximate. And again, the "junk" survives only because in particular instances it could. In all likelihood, that was the norm everywhere, and was so long before the roman empire.