Clivedurdle

A comment about taking Marcion seriously by Angelo atheist has prompted this thread.

We have a whole series of texts by various people and some of these texts have been given labels like the word of god and holy.

Is not a logical scientific approach to this to treat them all like fossils and to take them all seriously as evidence of something?

All the clearly forged documents, the apocryphal gospels, gnostic stuff etc etc etc should all be treated equally, without this assumption that MMLJ are somehow critical.

We need to establish clear timelines and relationships, have we?

It all feels like a huge jigsaw puzzle where a group of people have been shouting "it looks like this," but things do not fit, and when anyone suggests a different way to put it together they get shouted at!

But realistically all attempts are equal, we may get things to fit better by using other starting points - and a good place to start is to look carefully again at all the pieces we have.

Maybe Jesus is not in the middle, maybe it is story, Augustine and Eusebius?

DCHindley

If you think about it, fossils never intended themslves to be petrified and found millions of years later by archeologists, so their evidence has primacy of value. Those kinds of evidence can be treated equal, more or less, depending on where you find them and whether they are "in situ" or disturbed.

Inscriptions and documents are intended for posterity, and must be assumed to be making some sort of point, not necessarily report facts without bias. These kinds of relics cannot be taken as if having equal value. On the other hand, if we don't know what it is, we call it a "spindle whorl" or something equally vague.

In other words, we don't always know the value of everything we find. Someday, with luck, we'll find spindle whorls in a context that will finally tell us what purpose they actually served. If you don't know what I am talking about, then look up the term. They are little ceramic rings found by the hundreds in some archeological digs, and explanations for them range from toys to jewelry to sewing aids, but ultimately, everyone is guessing.

Finding the remains of an entire regiment of soldiers from one side of a conflict has a different value than the "official" report that says that same regiment "won" the engagement. If we didn't have the remains, we couldn't effectively evaluate the official statement as spin doctoring.

Sometimes inscriptions and documents can allow us to establish the sequence of events pretty accurately, such as the events surrounding the Bolshevic revolution in Russia (they are relatively accurately recounted in John Reed's _Ten Days that Shook the World_ and other sources have confirmed them and added facts what he was not privy to), but then you also have the explanations of these events that appear in the west (notably the US) and issued by Stalin's apparatus in the USSR, each influenced by the ideological orientations of the authors.

They do not hold equal weight. If it were not for the actual documents and dispatches that do survive, we would not know which version to believe on particular points (it turns out both sides omitted, made up and twisted facts to spin the story).

So, all things are not created equal, are they? As in all things, we have to compare and contrast.

DCH

mountainman

Here is how Eusebius
differentiates the authodoxy
and the heretical....


In the field of ancient history this is the case.
The field of biblical history is a special case.



I have made the observation that in the authodox
MMLJ canonical texts, the apostles are there presented
as at least above average representatives of humanity,
whereas in at least 6 of the non canonical acts, each of
the apostles are presented as below average representatives
of humanity.

Go figure. What could this possibly mean?
Maybe someone else picked up a pen?
But when, and who, and why?

The chronology of early christianity from the mainstream
perspective is a literally a dog's breakfast. You have got
sausages strung over the first few centuries, and so many
forgeries and instances of suspected fraud in the same
picture that the picture is a grey day.

Only when the sun of Nicaea rises out of the Eusebian
preHistory do the chronology of things start matching
what the archaelogical record tells us.


Quite obviously, we should check all possibilities.
I agree that it is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle and that
most of the pieces are missing.

Mainstream's conjecture that the field of interest
is the first one or two centuries assumes things
at face value. It assumes the documents we have
which were prepared in the first instance by Eusebius
and Constantine are legitimate.

But what if they are not legit?
We are dealing with a mafia boss.


The author of the Acts of Thomas (aka Judas) informs
us that Jesus is in the middle of a slave ring, that
Thomas is his slave, and that his slave apostles were
standing around diving up the nations by casting lots
as the gospel stories have us believe the Roman soldiers
casted lots for Jesus' clothes.

Now why wasn't the Acts of Thomas part of the Constantine
Bible? Jesus sells Thomas as a slave to an Indian merchant,
and thus the conquest of India by the christians commences.

Maybe this is a story written by Arius?

People being oppressed by the authodoxy
would have laughed at this version.

This seems to indicate that the Acts of Thomas is a
polemical reaction to the authodox NT Acts, and was
thus written only at the time the NT Acts became into
some authodox power structure.

This suggests post Nicaean origins for the Acts of Thomas,
and at least 5 other non canonical acts.

Mainstream BC&H chronology appears to be "at sea".
They abide by Eusebius and paleographical certificates.
C14 is telling us to look in the fourth century.
But no one wants to face the consequences
of what they might find by looking there.


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

arnoldo

Yes, we should take Marcion seriously especially since he accepted Paul due to his emphasis on "grace" rather than the Old Testament.

Clivedurdle

Agreed documents are not as neutral as fossils, but how did the first sort of documents occur?

mountainman

This is a good question to be asked of new testament literature.

Mainstream has naturally taken the documents at face value,
and with the authority that they purport to represent. As such
it assumes and seeks evidence of an organic growth over the
period of the first three centuries.

Mainstream has very little explanation of the non canonical texts
other than they were written by "heretics" and the like, and it
is similarly "at sea" with their chronology.

It is by no means impossible that both the canon and the
non canonical (reactionary) texts were authored in the fourth
century.

We have been given a moebius strip of literature to march
around like little warrior ants for centuries. If we were to
mentally investigate the possibility that it was Constantine
who twisted the ancient history, then we can begin to
examine both sides of the evidence - objectively.

The first sort of documents
are usually imperial orders.


Best wishes,


Pete Brown