mountainman

Without ancient historical evidence one word covers such certainty: faith.

mountainman

Thanks for quoting the RSV instead of the KJV.
People here appear fond of citing the RSV.
How does this version appear at Blue letter bible?

Here is the translation according to the NIV:

The question is whether these people, so decribed as deceivers, would have believed that Jesus existed, or whether these people would have believed that he did not exist.

mountainman

And yet our modern logic has its precedent articulation by the ancients as far back as Plato and Aristotle. While I totally agree that of the "common people", who were uneducated, could not read or write, and who were subject to mass manipulation by the more educated, and wealthy and influential class of citizens, many possessed primitive belief systems.

This is summarised in Seneca:



You are describing the "common people" above, and as such all that you say I can see to be quite reasonable.

However, when Constantine made the following statement at the Council of Antioch, he was not addressing the common people alone ....


According to Robon Lane Fox, Constantine was alive to the arguments of the skeptics. Here he is providing counter evidence to convince them that the Sybil who predicted the coming of Jesus in the epoch of deep BCE, could not have been a fake.

UNBELIEF and the Nicaean pronouncement that "Religious privileges are reserved for Christians

This law was not enacted for the common people alone but also for all the people of the empire, including the educated "Guardian Class" (to use the term used by Plato).

While I agree we would get no statements of UNBELIEF from the common people (by defn?; for a start they could not write, but there may have been exceptions) my expectation is that such statements would have been forthcoming from the educated class of Alexandrians c.324/325 CE in opposition to the floating of Jeebus.

In the generations of the early centuries, there would have been many well educated people, one's would could ask skeptical questions, and who would employ astute logic quite comparable to the modern world. For example, we need only read some of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" to see how the human mind of antiquity could express itself.

He may have been paraphrasing the Buddhist literature. Having said all this I must return to the military, social, religious and economic boundary event known as Nicaea.

Imagine you are a pagan and one of the relatively small educated class and you became aware of the new Emperor's religious pronouncement that your pagan religion has lost all its --- shall we say ---- "privileges". The temples were CLOSED. It was an era of PROHIBITION.

Many well educated and intellegent people immediately became extremely interested in the notion of what it was like to be Christian. It was a matter of survival. Many rich people had sudden dreams, and converted. Entire cities wrote petitions of alliegance to the incoming new Boss. They rapidly understood that it had to do with comprehending the contents of the Constantine Bible, so they eventually were able to read through it, to see for themselves the story of the Jeebus, which Constantine declared to be true.


Arius of Alexandria was a logician, and if you were read the Philip of Side fragmnent about Nicaea, you would find a situation where Nicaea saw a great confrontation between the philosophers and the so-called christian clergy. The philosophers are described as supporting the opinion of Arius. We are not dealing with the common people, but the educated classes here at Nicaea.

I reject the "Christian version" of Nicaea as twisted. A magic wand of 5th century ink has downplayed the savagery of the acceptance of the historical Jeebus.

My argument is that I quite expect that people of this Nicaean generation, and those following for some time, are those from whom we might find statements to the effect that they did not believe that the 300 year old Jeebus actually existed.

Arius, Nag Hammadi compilers, Julian and Nestorius have been listed as possible sources for such a statement. That's where I am up to atm Shesh.


What I suspect happened was that at this time the greatest UNBELIEF was related to the historical existence of a purportedly 300 year old Jeebus, but the unbelievers were eventually exterminated, and the record of their unbelief expunged (as best as possible) from the historical record.

It is called "damnatio memoriae" and it was applied to the books, writings, name and political memory of Arius of Alexandria. The Jeebus Church could not tolerate unbelief, and they won. The question is whether they managed to search our and destroy all the evidence of UNBELIEF.

Stuff is preserved against the odds. I have listed 5 possible sources. Those who understand the concept of positive and negative evidence should be very interested in these 5 possible sources.

I have been praying to Huey the Surf god. I have asked for a miracle, namely that the earlier history books of Ammianus, the first 13 are presumed "lost", are suddenly and unexpected found in a manuscript discovery somewhere, somewhen soon.

IMHO the information for example disclosed in Bullneck's obituary written by Ammianus will be like a boundary event of its own.





This question involves studying the UNBELIEF of the HJ in antiquity.

If we were to graph this unbelief, whether or not christians frolicked in the pre-Nicaean 300 years, we would expect to find a massive peak of unbelief in the HJ at that time the HJeebus got floated as the new and strange Roman god. A turbulent Arian controversy then persisted for centuries and centuries. At the heart of his massive socio-religious tornado of controversy was unbelief --- I think in the historical Jeebus.

mountainman

The idea that Jesus did not exist at Nicaea may have been called UNBELIEF.

The majesty of the Roman Emperor and "Pontifex Maximus" was being questioned.
Good god "chrestos" - what was the world coming to? A groaning of Arianism?

Anyone who espoused such an unbelief was a blasphemous heretic.


Here are two separate sources for "Unbelief in the Nicaean HJ" ...



(1) Constantine on the UNBELIEF of that evil "Porphyrian", Arius of Alexandria and his followers ....



(2) Eusebius on the UNBELIEF of the Arius of Alexandria and the Arian "heretics" ...

mountainman

The question about sources is not restricted to extant sources, even though Ehrman so qualifies his statement. Neither it is necessarily qualified by sources in the 1st and 2nd century, otherwise one already presumes the existence of Jesus as given in the undated new and strange testament.


The following from the blog on Ehrman's book, The unseen, as mentioned by Steven Carr in this post

outhouse

whats worse is the myth plattform is more faith, then HJ

outhouse

Are you missing the point to Nicea????


no one doubted HJ at all.

they only debated the divinity of BJ, it was just a matter of definition.






There were many people back then who didnt believe in the religion as it was a small sect growing rapidly. But that says nothing of the belief in a HJ or a study to determine that a teacher actually lived.

They did no scholarship on he subject back then, and this is your OP is it not?

aa5874

Have you forgotten that you claim that you are 55/45 in favor of HJ??? Your own figures suggest that there is not any significant difference between HJ and MJ.

If your tolerance is plus or minus 10% then you may be 55/45 in favor of MJ without even realizing it.

Please state you tolerance immediately so that your position can be properly analysed.

Your 55/45% borders on Agnosticism which means you really DON'T know and have NO idea if Jesus did exist.

And further, the MERE fact that you have introduced a NEW TAX Jesus means you are almost certain that all other HJs are FAKES.

mountainman

What point are you referring to?

The harmonious ascendancy of Constantine's christians?

The total acceptance of the Greek Alexandrians of the Bullneck Bible?

The stronger the beliefs in such things, the stronger the illusion is held in place that Nicaea was just a stroll in the park, and a bishops' tea party to which Constantine invited himself.



Ahhh! There we go. That was easy, wasn't it.

Sounds like Bart Ehrman and the Mainstreamers.


The Greek intellectual tradition just took one look at the Bullneck Bible and the Jesus story it contained from 300 years prior, and said to themselves in a very serious voice, we bow down to these historical facts about a 300 year old dead Jew.

The Alexandrian Greeks immediately acknowledged the superiority of Moses over Plato, and left their Plato behind them from that day forth.


BULLSHIT.



I take it that you have read about the Supporters of Arius at the Council of Nicaea from the Philip of Side fragment, written over a century after Nicaea.





Try and deal with the OP which seeks not belief (what you want to see in the evidence) but UNBELIEF (which you and others here do not want to see in the evidence).

I have cited two items of evidence above that appear to demonstrate that Arius of Alexandria and the Arians were characterised not by their belief, but by their very healthy unbelief.



The greatest scholar of that epoch, whose learned books were preserved in Rome and probably had copies in Alexandria, who wrote on such a variety of subjects, including Euclid and Plato and Vegetarianism and Plotinus, was the Platonic philosopher Porphyry.

Constantine ordered his books to be burnt
while the Bible was replicated fifty fold.

outhouse

100 years after [facepalm]


but lets look


Arius was a bishop and did not fight against god. They are painting him in a light they personally chose.


he only argued the divinity of HJ, and did not claim him to be of the same substance and power as yahweh



that wholeparagraph you posted falls a part when one who knows what the hell there doing places it into the proper context.

Poor try and your part