Ted Hoffman

<Gets a *huge* bag of popcorn and two litres of coke and puts feet on cushion>

yalla

Spelling question.
Ockham or Occam?
Or either?

Ted Hoffman

Occam's razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham.

spin

Watches the Da Vinci Code. *Sigh*

mountainman

I agree with your claim Chris, however you appear to forget that
my argument against the use of paleography with respect to the
extant manuscripts (and fragments thereof) of the NT involves
both fiction and forgery.

Our position is that when the New Testament (ie: the fabrication of
the Galilaeans) was presented to the empire by Constantine at the
council of Nicaea, there would have been copies of some of this
fictitious literature written for Nicaea in the Hadrian script, for the
purposeful ruse of having them identified via paleography to
be sourced from the time of Hadrian (ie: the second century).



Pete Brown
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/article_071.htm

mountainman

I think Julian referred to the new (and strange, according to Eusebius) testament as the "fabrication of the Galilaeans" in line with the use of
the term in Josephus. The Galilaeans were the "lawless men of Galilee".

In his translators introduction to "Against the Galilaeans" the translator
makes the mistake of associating "the Galilaeans" with "the tribe of christians".
I have dealt with this error by the translator in another thread here, and in
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essene...Galilaeans.htm

AFAIK Julian does not call Eusebius a "galilaean".
However Julian calls Eusebius "wretched".

Neither in the extant writings of Julian does he name by name those
wicked men who composed the fiction. However it is our belief
that this issue was one which Cyril of Alexander left out of his refutation
for fear that the issue would contaminate the minds of christians.




Pete Brown

mountainman

I think that Constantine wanted to sell the package to all the attendees
at the Council of Nicaea, but wanted to appear at arm's length from the
new and strange religion. He did not want anyone to think it was actually
created and sponsored by himself in the previous decade leading into Nicaea.

I think he was very successful at selling the fabrication.

YES. The gnostic exercise was undertaken in order to calumnify the
dominant philosophy of the Roman empire at the time of Constantine,
and which had been the dominant philosophy of the ROman empire in
a continuous fashion for the preceeding 300 years.

This dominant philosophy (with its religious interfaces) was pythagoreansism
or neo-pythagoreanism, which subsumes (IMO) the philosophy of (neo-)
platonism.

Eusebius first calumnifies the pythagoreans in history, leaving the gnostics
(who were but pythagoreans tainted with christianity) and the tribe of
christians standing in a good light. Eusebius then calumnifies the gnostics
leaving the sole remaining tribe standing, that of the christians.

Yes it is, but the engineer behind it was a supreme emperor who had
absolute power over the empire, and control of its literature preservation
processes for 30 years.

He conquered the empire not with the sword, but with the literature.
The Nicaean creed evidences this.


Pete Brown
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essene...Galilaeans.htm

mountainman

Welcome Ted,

You should be entitled to know that it was in fact your posts
relating to Eusebius back in 2002 (I referenced these in my first
post) were the reason that I decided to bring this discussion to
this discussion group.

I think I have covered most of my ideas, but I will always be ready
to be shown to be wrong, eith in whole or in part, through such
discussion and provsion of information in this (or any) forum.

Best wishes from the Land of Oz,



Pete Brown
NAMASTE: “The spirit in me honours the spirit in you”

Ted Hoffman

Hi Pete, I think you are doing a great job. You have a lot of work to do if you are serious about this hypothesis. Lots of work.
I played with the idea for a while but I had not researched much on it and couldnt handle Kirby's challenges adequately. I wasnt particularly passionate or committed to the idea so never followed through. But I appreciate your efforts.
I will try and get some time and review what you have done so far.

yummyfur

How would fake heresies help sell anything to anyone? how would they make it appear Constantine was at arms length? Why would he want to appear at arms length?

So Eusebius writes the gnostic gospels, and then for some reason these get translated into Coptic by 340 CE(carbon dated Nag Hammadi papyri, also carbon date for Gospel of Judas is 220-340CE), despite the fact that they are just props with no followers, what reason would they need Coptic versions for these props? Why spend so much time on translating such props to Coptic, when these idiots couln't even get standard Latin translations(!!! language of empire) of their new religions texts, making Jerome and Augustine complain about the crappyness and variance of the various existing Latin NT texts in the late fourth/early 5th century(some of which we have copies of so no need to take Jerome's word).

Well given your above arguments, you would probably have to accept any highly speculative (hi) story. I mean the earliest papyri fragments of the Iliad are Third Century BCE, so my guess is the story was actually written by Aristotle, at the suggestion of Alexander the Great