Chili

I think that Pete should try to understand that just as you must create fire before you can purify gold you must feed wolves so that they can nurture lambs because sheep only have milk and not meat as food for sheep.

The three orders feed my lambs, tend my sheep, and feed my sheep, that is followed by the solemn declaration wherein "another will tie you fast and carry you off against your will" (Jn.21:15-) is where the fire is needed to finish the job and for this the wolves are needed and is why the first Church was called Christian and out of this chaos the Catholic church was purged.

That practice was maintained by the Jesuits abroad who were charismatic to do fantastic tricks to gain converts fast but that later would be shunned by the same religion that introduced it first once they got the women on side.

mountainman

Thankyou very much for these references Maklelan.

mountainman

"The chi-rho device also appears in the margin
of a hypomnema on Homer, Iliad,
dated to the first century bce,
the chi-rho here a sign for
XPNCTOC (marking passages “useful” for excerpting).

The tau-rho device appears on some coins
of King Herod (37–4 bce), the taurho
intended to identify them with the
third year of his reign.


The Codex, the Nomina Sacra and the Staurogram’, in Text
and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity:
Essays in Honour of ...

http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstrea...TB_article.pdf

Maklelan

We're dealing with three different articles. Your quote is an alteration of some quotes from of this article:

The change from χρηστον to χρηστος is not insignificant, as it suggests association with an individual named Chrestos. In actuality, it just marked the passage as interesting.

The title you've given us is from this text, and the link you've given us is to a third text. When I googled your quotes, I only came up with your website. Looking around I was struck by some of your claims. I hope you don't mind my longer post, but I'm just astonished at your methods.

I thought the following somewhat lengthy quote was interesting in light of your appeals to three different publications by Larry Hurtado and your arguments elsewhere:

Notice Hurtado's comment about Snyder's book, which you link to and have brought up before:

And in the footnote to this comment:

You wouldn't know this to read your website! You don't present any of the scholarship that contradicts your assumptions, you just ask questions that have been answered numerous times over as if no one has ever asked them before. Without presenting other opinions, which are without exception informed by far more scholarship and education than yours could ever be, you simply insist that your guesses are as good as theirs. As I've shown, it's not a guess what underlies XC. It unquestionably abbreviates χριστος, and you've not yet been able to address that point.

You wonder out loud where the nomina sacra come from, suggesting overseers of the scribal projects (whom you appear to have simply invented) commanded it, and suggesting it doesn't refer to Jesus or Christ. If you'd actually read the Hurtado articles to which you referred you would have found discussion of the origins of the nomina sacra and a reference to an entire article on the question (this article). If you had kept looking, you'd have also found this more recent article. As an example of how your refusal to do actual research undermines your entire endeavor, Hurtado distinguishes quite definitively from the abbreviations used in non-Christian Greek and Latin texts and those of Christian texts:

His comments are corroborated by the staurogram article, which mentions two different kinds of abbreviations from non-Christian texts that only use the first two letters of the word and abbreviate completely mundane words. This is a completely different usage from the nomina sacra, which use the first and last letters and never abbreviate mundane words or names. He states further:

He gives a likely reason for the adoption of this practice of abbreviation:

He goes on to discuss various theories of origin and then describes his own. Before you start wildly speculating about these phenomena, maybe you should read the tets you cite from instead of just quote mining them.

mountainman

Pachomius saw a "vision" in Alexandria c.324 CE and fled the ancient capital to establish multiple remote monastic settlements hundreds of miles up the Nile near modern Nag Hammadi. Tens of thousands followed him over the subsequent few decades. Most scholars conjecture that the Nag Hammadi Codices were manufactured in a Pachomian monastery near Nag Hammadi. They are C14 dated to the mid 4th century, a date corroborated by cartonage analysis and other means.


Some time ago it was that I gathered together A collation of resource notes on nomina sacra (sacred names). None of these articles are authored by myself, I just collected them and provided the appropriate attribution. The 6th article, Article 06: Fabulating Jesus, the Coptic Nomina Sacra, and intriguing questions is not my article. It was sourced (at the time) from another article that was then entitled Fabulating Jesus: Why Gnostic "Codes" Do Not Name the Historical Jesus. The google search for fabricating jesus seems to indicate the article is not longer active. The author of the article you cite as my "OPINION" is the author of Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief (or via: amazon.co.uk) [Paperback] John Lamb Lash.

J-D

You get inured after a while.

stephan huller

Maklelan

The paradox with mountainman is - as I am sure you will see - that he essentially accuses Eusebius of using the very methods for corrupting Christianity as mountainman uses to 'expose' him. No matter what you might say to demonstrate to Pete (= mountainman) that he is manipulating evidence it will fall on deaf ears because - strangely - Pete assumes that Eusebius did the same things in antiquity. It's a bizarre nihilistic exercise which will end up testing your patience.

To the best that I can determine Pete's methods serve as 'proof' that historical manipulations of facts can take place and ultimately will always overcome the real truth. The fact that Eusebius's alleged efforts led to a world religion that numbers in the billions today and Pete can't so much as find a single disciple after decades of efforts never makes any impression on Pete. I doubt anything else you will ever say will either.

I have found that engaging in any sort of conversation with Pete takes on the appearance of clubbing a seal high on angel dust or that story in the rabbinic literature about the teacher who hit the same Christian in the head with a hammer day after day (i.e. despite being bloodied he/it no pain and keeps coming back for more). As long as you don't lose your cool you will find that he will keep coming back for more day after day simply because he is convinced that by repeating the same series of untruths day after day the rest of the world will become hypnotized and immediately come over to accept his lies as truths.

Maklelan

Relevance?

I apologize for misunderstanding. The portion of text I cited as your opinion is not in basic HTML, as are your other smaller quotes, which actually carry attribution of some kind. The link you place at the beginning and end of that portion of your site is broken, so I had no idea who wrote the portion not in basic HTML. Based on the informal prose, the content of the argument, and the naive methodologies, I figured it was yours. I was wrong.

stephan huller

An interesting fact I did not know before a few minutes ago. In discussing the use of Chrestos among early Christians Judith Lieu (Christian identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world p. 258):

The dating of Hermas is given by the Muratorian Canon as written during the reign of Pius I (= 142 - 154 CE). I think this reinforces the idea that the term Christianoi is later - i.e. mid-second century. The Latinized Greek is very unusual and likely presupposes an origin in Latin-speaking circles. If Christians originally identifies themselves as Christaioi or Christenoi why haven't these forms survived? I don't think that the use of Chrestos and Chrestoi are as marginalized and as ideosyncratic as you think they are. It is Christianoi which is the anomaly, albeit one which we have grown to take as second nature.

I think scholars underestimate the influence that Celsus had in defining 'Christianity' even though he was a hostile witness. Not a single Church Father mentions his work until Origen close to a century after itself publication yet most of the Fathers in between the True Word and Against Celsus draw inspiration from his work to counter the heresies even though the work itself is virulently hostile to the religion of Jesus. A very, very puzzling situation which is one of many odd things about the influence of this work.

As a non-Christian I was always puzzled from a young age why the religion doesn't bear the name of Jesus if Jesus was the founder of the group. Herodians, Caesarians, Marcionites, debe Jannai, Dositheans etc etc. but the great religion of Christianity takes such a generic terminology for itself (overlooking for a moment the unusual Latinized Greek form). Imagine the tradition of Sabbatai Zevi identifying itself as 'those of the messiah.' It's bizarre and it only seems unremarkable because most of you were born into the religion. It can be argued that Islam does not bear the name of its founder because of the careful manner in which this tradition learned to guard itself from those who 'exaggerated' Muhammad's greatness. The same caution cannot be said for Christianity.

stephan huller

I decided to go through some other second century Church Fathers to see if they use the term 'christianoi' starting with Irenaeus. Not all of Irenaeuis's writings survive in Greek. Nevertheless the only reference to 'Christian' in all the surviving Greek material occurs in Book Four:

I don't know what any of this means but if you would have told me that there is only one Christianoi reference in the Greek text of Irenaeus at the outset, I wouldn't have believed it. Moreover since most people think the books of Against Heresies were written in succession and a date of 190 CE for Book Four is a good guess, that's also surprising.

The passage is also interesting because it sounds like an orthodox response to typical gnostic interpretations of scripture. In other words, when the Christians (= the orthodox) read the OT new words come from the writings. It should be noted that the argument that 'new things' come from old words is also found in chapter 11 of the Samaritan Asatir one of the oldest surviving texts as a messianic prophesy.

Any religious Jew knows this reference from Daniel 12:3 as one of the most important in kabbalah

Irenaeus however tells us that Daniel 12 was especially important to the followers of Mark (cf. AH 1.20.1). I think the sect was more Jewish than anything in orthodox Christianity.