Roger Pearse

I think perhaps you meant to say "we have many fewer handwritten copies of the fake gospels, compared to the canonical ones"? This is so. We have fewer copies of *everything* compared to the canonical gospels. The reason for that is that for a thousand years copying in the Eastern empire was mainly in the hands of churchmen, who needed bibles more than anything else. So that is what they copied. After that, in order of number, they copied works by the major Fathers, and liturgical books.

So I think that your point is confused here.

The loss of ancient literature is not due to Spanish Inquisition-style book burnings, but to the collapse of ancient society.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

dog-on

There, fixed it for you!

Joan of Bark

Bart Ehrman addresses the OP in a couple of chapters of Misquoting Jesus. As others have pointed out, the addition or changing of statements in scripture was a way of combating 'heretical' Christian concepts by the proto-orthodox.

aa5874

There are no such epistles that have been CONFIRMED to be authentic. Many persons BELIEVE that there was a person named "Paul" but this is only a belief, there are no known independent non-apologetic source that have written a single word about "Paul".

All the "Pauline Epistles" were canonised as authentic and written by a single person, now it has been deduced that this scenario is not the case.

All that is really known or deduced is that the "Pauline Epistles" have many authors and further, their date of writing and circulation are also UNCONFIRMED.

All we read about the "Pauls" are from apologetics sources which are shrouded with fiction and forgeries.

I cannot accept the "Pauls" as authentic.

mens_sana

If you had to CONFIRM that your food was safe before you ate it — you would no longer be with us.

That the Pauline epistles were originally accepted as all being from Paul's hand is irrelevant. We know now that some were by his followers.

Apologetic sources are not automatically discredited because of their agenda. However, it is true that critical, discriminating evaluation of sources is an uncommon talent. Very few people can tolerate "gray" areas.

That the exact date of Paul's letters and the date of their initial publication is UNCONFIRMED, is a fact of history — but that does not mean that the authentic letters are not Paul's work. That later writers cite him gives us a range that is workable.

I would never expect you to accept the "Pauls" as authentic. Only one was. The rest followed in the minds of the author of Acts and of the Pauline "school."

Solitary Man

You know this how?

jules?

Quite right all history is guess work, we make assumptions but the wiki article [fairly basic and to the point] sums it up

i think James Robinson's conclusions are logical especially when the books were buried at a time of orthodoxies oppression of heretics.

DCHindley

Jules,

We need to remember that the use to which documents are put are not always those intended by the original authors. For instance, I would suggest that the four gospels were written as "apologies" (clothed as "bioi" = personal life sketches) intended to "explain" the founder claimed by early Christian as someone other than a political rebel. Reason? By the time they were written, Christianity had already morphed into a form of mystery religion and was in fact no longer the political party the Roman government kept treating them as. Later, (late 2nd and 3rd century) they were used exclusively in church worship and instruction, and this is reflected in how they are cited in later Christian literature.

Another thing about early 2nd century Christianity is that they seem to know very little about their early development. They don't know a firm date for Jesus' death, how James the Just died, the manner by which Judas (the one who is supposed to have betrayed Jesus) died, even how or when Paul died. They don't know where specific apostles or disciples worked or died. There are plenty of conjectures offered in 2nd & 3rd century Christian documents, but they come across as guesses, and generally as wishful guesses ("Well, if they were like ideal Christians of our day, their life/death/teaching must have been like this ...").

This is the origin of "authors" attributed to the canonical gospels ("This gospel would certainly have been written by ..."), of Pilate's _Acta_ ("official" reports, although there are some which assume Pilate was a Christian sympathizer or convert and others that make him a sceptic). Et cetera.

The (hypothetical) Pauline interpolations (the proportion of which varies depending upon commentator) are another matter. Regardless of where they are proposed to come from, they seem to have been retrojections of the beliefs of later ages into the documents of an earlier age. Another example of this is the difference between the "short" Greek recension of the Ignatian epistles and their greatly expanded "long" recension from a century or so later.

As for Celsus, I'm afraid that some types of literature simply go out of style and stop being copied. Thankfully the type of Christian defensive work within which much of Celsus' book has been preserved did not go out of style. Some anti-Christian works by pagans survived simply because they were well written (e.g., Porphory ... Celsus was not so well written, just polemical, or Latin authors as this represented high "culture"), or helped Christians orient their history within the framework of events supposedly contemporary to their origins (e.g., Josephus).

DCH

Solitary Man

Its a possibility. James Robinson maintains that its a possibility, and the wiki follows suit. You stated it as if it were fact.

aa5874

Your statement does not make much sense.

I was food-poisoned once, most likely I would not have been poisoned if I had confirmed the food was safe, in effect, I am lucky to be alive, today.



There are no confirmed followers of "Paul". It is just guesswork to claim followers of "Paul" wrote some of the epistles.

Tell me the name of the follower of "Paul" who claimed to be "Paul" in 2Timothy 4.13 and wrote:

2 Timothy 4.13 Apologetic sources are discredited when they fundamentally write fiction and when their stories cannot be corroborated by external non-apologetic sources.

There are no such things as authentic letters from "Paul". There are letters with the name "Paul", it has been deduced that there were more than one author of the epistles.

You cannot prove or show that the name of the author of any Epistle was a real person called "Saul/Paul in the 1st century.