Jeffrey Gibson

If memory serves, Pete has intimated on more than one occasion that the Gospel accounts of Jesus are based upon Philostratus Life of Apollonius.

We have also seen Pete claiming that the use of the word δαίμων to signify "evil spirit" "demon" is a Christian invention and part of distinctly Christian vocabulary.

I note with interest that if Pete's claim about δαίμων is true, then he has created quite a conundrum for himself since he has actually falsified his claim that Christianity is a 4th century Constantinian invention.

Consider this.

It is indisputable that in his Life of Apollonius -- which was written between before 250 CE and probably around 22 CE -- Philostratus at least once uses δαίμων with the supposedly "christian sense" of "evil spirit" demon" -- i.e. at Vit. Ap., IV, 10, 147 f (but see too,Vit. Ap., III, 38, 138; IV, 20, 157 f. where he depicts Apollonius healing many who are said to be sick because they are possessed by "demons")


But if Pete is correct that the use of δαίμων with the meaning of "evil spirit" "demons" is indeed a Christian invention and a part of a specifically "Christian" (or at least "Matthean") vocabulary, then he must conclude that Philostratus was familiar with Christianity or at least the Gospel of Matthew

This in turn means that Pete must also conclude:

1. that Christian literature -- or at least the Gospel of Matthew -- is earlier than 220 CE

2. that Philostratus' portrait of Apollonius is based on the Gospel portrait of Jesus, not the other way around, and, most importantly,

3. that Christianity is not a Constantinian invention.

BTW, we reach similar conclusions when we combine Pete's claim about the origin and special limited Christan use of the word δαίμων to mean "evil spirit" "demon" with data from Porphyry's De Philosophia ex Oraculis Haurienda (Philosophy from Oracles) -- which was written sometime before 299 CE. Note how at III, 164 bc Porphyry specifically describes the δαίμωνes he speaks of there as πονηροὺς (evil).

In the light of this, it seems clear that Pete is either going to have to give up his claim about how δαίμων meaning "evil spirit" "demons" is a Christian/Matthean invention and part of a special "Christian" vocabulary, or, if he wont, he will have to admit that Philostratus and Porphyry knew, and decided to include, Christian usage of the word within their own writings. And this will falsify his oft repeated thesis that Christianity (and its writings) didn't come into existence until the 4th century.

Jeffrey

mountainman

Jeffrey maybe you missed this response in the original thread:

The Philostratus reference is as follows in its full context:



This is translated from the Greek to English by F.C. Conybeare. I am assuming the original Greek word translated as "demon" was "daimon". But how do we know that Philostratus, if he had been standing by Conybeare and had known English, would have translated "daimon" as "demon" and not for example a "spirit" or a "semi-divine being inferior to the Gods". Do you understand my point with this question? It was Coneybeare who rendered this equivalence, and not necessarily Philostratus


See precisely the same controversy over the relatively recent (Coptic to English) translation of "daimon" (initially to "spirit", and then via Deconick's suggestion to "demon") recently with the gJudas.

The original translation team contracted by Nat Geo rendered the term "daimon" in the Gospel of Judas as "spirit".

These people on the team made this original decision for a reason, Deconick's suggested improvement to translate "daimon" as "demon" notwithstanding.







εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Jeffrey Gibson

And apparently you not only have not read the text you cite (let alone examined the other uses of the term in question elsewhere in Life of Apollonius) but have missed (or are you ignoring?) my response to your response

And nice of you to ignore the evidence from Porphyry, too. No doubt you'll explain that away by asserting (but not providing an evidence other than supposition) that it was edited.

Was the evidence of Plutarch and that found in the Greek Magical Papyri and the Corpus Hermeticum edited too?



Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Excuse me, Pete, but I think you have misread what April has actually said.

Let's look at it again:

Note that she does not deny that the word she thinks should be rendered differently than the NatGeo translators (Kasser and Meyer appealing to its use in in this sense and its contextual correspondence with -- Plato Symposium 202e-203a) do, [and in the FWIW department, Karen King renders it as "god" and not without justification -- see Pagels and King, Reading Judas, 115), does and did not ever signify "spirit". Nor does she deny that "demon" and "spirit" are semantically mutually exclusive terms (see her discussion of this in her The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, p. 48-51, where she goes on to assume without proof that in the eyes of the Nat Geo translators, "Spirit" means "benevolent Spirit").


In any case, can you show me that the word the Nat Geo translators translated as "spirit" is indeed the Greek word "daimon". Do you even know what text is within the gospel of Judas that April is speaking of?


Can you also show me that, given its context and the theology of the Gospel of Judas , "spirit" is a bad translation of the word in question, even if the word behind the translation is "daimon"?

Aren't you also assuming that the Nat Geo translators did not think that "Spirit" has no connotations of "evil spirit", let alone that the meaning of Spirit as "evil spirit", if this is what the word in question means, is not clear from the context in which it is used?.

And why do you bring this "controversy" up anyway? What is it supposed to demonstrate? It certainly doesn't demonstrate the truth of your thesis. In fact, just the opposite. If April is indeed saying what you take her to be saying, then what she says stands against your thesis that daimon did not ordinarily mean "evil spirit?, let alone that it was only in Christian writings that it did. And it falsifies your chronology of Christianity.

Judas is a late second century document. If it uses daimon in the way that according to you was first used by the author of Matthew, and then again only by Christians, then Matthew and Christianity are earlier than the Gospel of Judas.

Or do you now place Judas in the 4th century?

Jeffrey

mountainman

My response was post # 202 in the original thread,
I cannot see that you have subsequently responded to it.
If so, which post #?


Please I am not ignoring it, but rather I am firstly attempting to focus on the citations which are expected to have preceeded the Apostle Matthew in order to substantiate the possible claim that Matthew is the first to use the term daimon in an exclusively negative sense.

After this question has been answered I will move forward through the citations in a chronological sense towards these three citations.



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

Yes thankyou very much for elucidating this, and for pointing out that Karen King renders it as 'god' (which I was not aware of, so thanks again). I had been following this earlier but the recent breaking waves on the events surrounding papers on gJudas have eluded my investigation.

“Judas said, "Master, as you have listened to all of them, now also listen to me. For I have seen a great vision."

And when Jesus heard this, he laughed and said to him, "You thirteenth daimon, why do you try so hard? But speak up, and I shall bear with you.”

translated from the Coptic ms by Rodolphe Kasser, The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition: Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos

I cited gJudas only to make mention of the most recent high profile discussion on the rendering of the term "daimon" to the English language. I have no understanding of either Coptic or greek but I do understand the English language to a certain extent.


No I only became interested when I learnt that the Coptic was mapped to the Greek word "daimon", although I have been interested in the manuscript itself and Codex Tchacos for some time.

Particularly the C14 date and the final report from Jull at UA. I still have not been able to find Jull's final report on gJudas from 2005. We may have discussed this in the past. Peter Head made a report which I read.



It was just a recent scholarly flurry over the translation of the term "daimon" from the OP into the English. I don't think its all over yet.


I have consistently argued for the investigation and discussion of the hypothesis that all the books of the non canonical NT (e.g. the "gnostic gospels and acts etc") were authored as a literary reaction by the Alexandrian Greeks to the appearance of the books of the canonical NT. This hypothesis is unrelated to the provenance of the NT itself, and for the sake of the argument I am prepared to accept that the canonical books were around in the 2nd and/or 3rd centuries.

In regard to gJudas therefore (along with the rest) I place its Greek authorship between 325 and 340 CE, and its Coptic translation into the Codex Tchacos after this. The C14 results are 220 to 340 CE. A loose fragment of papyrus from inside the codex, C14 dated to 333 CE (+/- 60 years) was excluded from the final report according to Head. The translation team according to another report I have read prefer a date in the 4th century for the Coptic ms. I prefer a date in the 4th century, after Nicaea for the Greek original.


At one stage I entertained the notion contrasting Judas as the "Thirteenth Demon" - Constantine as the "Thirteenth Apostle".

I was not aware at that time (2011) that the underlying term was "daimon".




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Jeffrey Gibson

Eluded? You mean these waves knew you were coming after them and hid from you?

Pagels' and Kings' book (as well as April's and, for that matter,Meyer's Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous apostle of Jesus in which he notes why he has translated the word in question as "spirit" , are hardly recent (Meyer's book came out in the same year that April's did -- 2007, as did Pagels' and King'). Nor are they obscure or hard to find. They are readily available. So what you mean by "eluded" is that you haven't done your homework.


What I was asking for, Pete, was the Coptic text of this section of GJudas.

High profile??? Has April's claim been all over the news? Has it had legs? Where else besides her blog and her book can the alleged kerfluffle be found?

This is actually a tempest in a teapot -- especially in light of the note (57) that appears on pp. 157-158 of Meyer's Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous apostle of Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk), where he observes that the word in question could be translated as "demon", but that that would convey to an English reader, who more often than not equates "demon" with "evil spirit", the wrong sense of what Jesus is asserting about Judas in this text.

So what? The question is the meaning of a word in a Coptic text, not whether, and to what extent, you have any understanding of English.

In any case, since this both ignores the question that I asked --namely, whether "spirit" is a bad translation of the word under discussion -- and avoids answering it, I'll take this as an admission that you don't know the answer to my question.


No what? That you aren't making the assumption that I noted you seem to be making? That the meaning of the word is not clear from its context?

Coptic was what?? And how does this answer the questions I asked you?


This is not an answer to my question about what you thought you were demonstrating by bringing the "flurry" (?) up. Nor does it deal with my observation that :

So we have yet another dodge from you.

So the author of GJudas was an Alexandrian Greek? Do we have any evidence that Sethians were Alexandrians (not to mention "pagans?)

The provenance of the NT?? Are you sure you understand the meaning of the word "provenance"? It has to do with "the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature", not the date of origin of an object or work.

In other words, you want to have and eat your cake at the same time -- especially when it comes to your how you will treat evidence which, if you maintained your thesis about Christianity being a 4th century invention, would falsify your claims.

Yes, we know you do.

But once again, you studiously ignore the fact that the date of the media on which something was written has little to nothing to do in determining the original date of a work's composition (only its terminus ante quem). If it did, we'd have to date the Odyssey to the 3rd century CE.

Sorry. Pete, but this is just more of your special pleading.


Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

BTW, why is a discussion of what appears in GJudas being brought up in a thread about Philostratus use of δαίμων? What could this possible tell us about whether or not Philostratus would say that F.C. Conybeare' was correct to translate ξυνῆκαν οἱ Ἐφέσιοι τοῦ δαίμονος as "Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon" with δαίμονος = evil spirit".


Jeffrey

mountainman

There is an alternative hypothetical conclusion which presents itself, and which I will in this thread put forward for discussion.

Namely that the gospel authors had Philostratus' VA before them and created a Jesus character who was able to command the spirits in an extremely similar manner that is related of Apollonius by Philostratus.

We need to be mindful that Philostratus was commissioned by the Emperor's wife to prepare this "Life of Apollonius", it was not some backwater Galilaean publishing job, it was high profile.

We need to be mindful that the books of Apollonius of Tyana himself were then still in circulation within the Roman Empire.


Apollonius' command of "daimons"


The hypothesis would then regard that with the historical life of Apollonius in the 1st century, and the circulation of his books in the early to middle 2nd century (and beyond until they were destroyed c.325 CE) there was a shift in the Greek world (and in language) in the understanding of the nature of the gods and the spirits and their relationship to man. We do not have any of his books before us, but Eusebius preserves a fragment of Apollonius and regards him as an authority on the Abstinence of Sacrifice.

If you read this you can see that Apollonius is ahead of his time.



Another fact supporting the hypothetical conclusion that the Gospel authors wrote after 220 CE (when Philostratus published VA) is that Philostratus is silent on the Christians. OTOH the author of Acts mentions "Apollos" as one of the teachers around Corinth, and in Codex Bezae this "Apollos" is made explicitly "Apollonius".


Finally we have the following translation of an inscription to Apollonius:


We might ask whether the Greek inscription supports the following variant translation

'This man, named after Apollo,
and shining forth Tyana,
extinguished the faults sins of men.

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Jeffrey Gibson

I trust you realize, Pete, that if this is so, then you are admitting that your claim about Christians being the first to give the word δαίμων the sense of "evil spirit" hasn't a leg to stand on -- for as you have elsewhere admitted, Philostratus's clearly several times uses δαίμων to mean "evil spirit" and therefore we have instances of such use before the rise of Christianity and the composition by Christians of the Jesus story.

Are you sure you want to go there, Pete?

You might indeed ask, especially given your agenda and your Greeklessness. But unless you provide us with a transcription in Greek of the Apollonius inscription, we won't be able to say whether, given its wording, it can, let alone does.

So what's the text of the inscription, Pete? And what Greek expressions within it do you think might deserve to be translated as "extinguished" (rather that "might drive out) and "the sins of men" rather than "pains of" or "pains among" men?

BTW, Pete. What's the date of this inscription?

Jeffrey