stephan huller

No I have the deepest respect for Andrew Criddle because he has such an amazing grasp of the sources. Everyone at this site should realize how fortunate we are to have someone like this at our disposal. That doesn't mean I always agree with his conclusions. But he and Roger Pearse are wonderful presences here at the site.

It's the sign of mean mind to surround oneself with people of like-minded opinions. No one should want to end up as the caricature from LaRochefoucauld who declared "we seldom find such sensible men as those who agree with us."

darstec

What sources? We don't have any.

While Andrew does sometimes offer interesting insight, Roger offers nothing that cannot be found in the Fundamentalist's catechism book. I've have never, ever seen him offer an opinion that was not party line orthodoxy. In fact I doubt he has ever denied a six day creation.

Toto

There's no need to shout. We all know the varied ideological positions of the posters here, but we can still discuss topics of common interest.

Transient

So lets see now - all christians that surround themselves in churches with other christians must have a mean mind. Same goes for Jews, Muslims etc etc etc.
What a load of rubbish.

darstec

Sorry. I thought perhaps he was hard of hearing. He mentions original sources more than once as though such things actually exist, yet never defines what he means by original sources. Worse yet, at least one of those two whom he so admires couldn't read any originals even if we had them.

stephan huller

Yes, I think that 'group think' is a way of comforting oneself for intellectual shortcomings. That applies to Christians, Jews, Muslims and Atheists.

If you can't think for yourself its unlikely you'll have any better luck surrounding yourself with a lot of noise. You might as well go to a pub and choose a better tasting narcotic.

charles

Darstec

Surely you can't be suggesting that we don't have ANY sources for early Christianity. What are we talking about then if there are no sources?

yalla

Good question.

It should almost be a rule that when we cite a 'source' we give the provenance of that source.

Then we could find out how 'original' or close in time and place and person to whatever the 'original' was the claimed document actually is.
For example I have numerous times seen that 'Papias said ..." when actually what should be said is "Papias said, as claimed by Irenaeus in ...., the oldest ms of whose work we have is ......which is not in the language in which Irenaeus wrote......and this text was translated by.....based on a ms dating probably sometime in the ...century and found, so it is thought, by ... at the monastery of .....".
Or similar, as appropriate.

Now the wording, fluency level and readability would suffer but the accuracy would not.
I suspect the credibility level of much that is cited would take a sudden dive if it became standard practice..

darstec

Stephan keeps mentioning original sources. We do not have any. We have copies of copies of copies about 1000 years removed from any original source. And those copies passed down through unashamedly biased hands, the Catholic Church.

Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the Hebrew manuscripts/fragments found there are very different from the Masoretic Hebrew Texts, what we have as early Christian documents are bound to be biased and in error in the same way. And we can tell that from some of the Greek texts we have found.

We don't know what Papias, or Polycarp or Irenaeus said because there are no original copies of their works. We have fourth and fifth century authors telling us what they supposedly said. And worse, we have no evidence except for faith alone that those people even existed. Compound that with the fact that even those fifth century authors' writings are copies of copies of copies a thousand years old we can safely say we have no originals. What we have left for us is dubious and biased.

aa5874

But, do you have an original of any book today. There is really only ONE original and all we have are copies.

People normally copy books either by hand or by some printing machinery.

But, you MUST ADMIT that the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been COPIED from some other source and perhaps NOT even copied from the original

Well, if the Church was HONEST we should have very good COPIES OF the writings of Papias, Polycarp, or Irenaeus.