Transient

Could someone post what they think is the single biggest obvious flaw in Mountainman's theory about Constantine.

Keep it simple so that I can understand it please.
Mostly what I read in other threads seems to involve a bit of dodging of questions, seemingly by Mountainman, so I would appreciate it if each person carefully answered the questions asked of them if they are relevant.

What is the silver bullet that wipes away his theory?

Toto

Please see this thread:

Has mountainman's theory been falsified by Dura Europa?

If that is too complicated, here is the executive summary: the remains of a Christian house church have been located at the town of Dura that can be reliably dated to before 254 CE. Dura was a city on the edge of the Roman empire bordering on Parthia, an enemy of Roma. To defend it against a Sassanian siege, the inhabitants filled in all the area near its weakest wall between 254 and 257CE. After the siege, the city was abandoned and was covered by sand and mud and disappeared from sight. This sealed and preserved the environment so that nothing could change until 20th century archeologists came along. You can't get much better than this for hard evidence in history.

The church can be identified as Christian based on a baptismal font, murals of identifiably Christian scenes, and a fragment of a gospel.

For most of the Christian world, this house church is not especially signficant, because Christians believe that their history started in the first century. Radicals think that Christianity actually started in the second century. Everyone agrees that Constantine was the source of major changes in Christianity.

But Pete goes beyond all of this: he thinks that Christianity was invented out of whole cloth by Constantine in the fourth century, when he directed Eusebius to write four different gospels and forge all of the rest of the New Testament. The church at Dura Europa and a few other artifacts are tests of his theory, and are enough for most people to decide that the theory is baseless.

Transient

Thanks Toto - I will read it first.

Sheshbazzar

Then there are those of us that are certain that Chreistianity started in the 3rd century......BC, with doctrinal roots that go back even further.

Transient

Ok I read quite a bit about it.
Also read http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/article_072.htm
Pete puts up a couple of other possible reasons for the objects being there.
The trouble with stuff from back then is that other possibilities of contamination are possible tho maybe not that likely, but they cannot be ruled out, or can they?
How can one be sure that Pete's possiblities for the Dura stuff is not correct, however unlikely?

avi

In my opinion, Pete's theory is not about Constantine, but about the new testament. That theory, if I understand correctly, is that the Roman Emperor assigned to his trusted associate, Eusebius, the task of creating a new religion with a new testament, de novo. Since this new religion was to serve as the State Religion, all other religions were accordingly purged. As a necessary consequence, many original documents and monuments from preceding centuries, many, many of which conflicted with the Roman trinitarian exposition, were accordingly destroyed.

My objection to this theory has nothing to do with evidence, hence it is an illustration of superstitious thinking:

I imagine, without evidence, that Lord Constantine, having waged war across half the globe, for more than a decade, engaging in battle with his army from Germany to Persia, was a relatively brilliant man, a militarist, a murderer, and an authoritarian commander supreme.

The new testament, as I have read it, is NOT the work of such a person, or his surrogate. Constantine, in my opinion, would not have constructed such a tome with so many errors, so many contradictions, and so many ambiguities, and with a non-Roman Jew as the hero of the story.

This statement is facile, and in my opinion, now that I have read Clark Hopkins' book, incorrect.

I intend to revisit this thread in January, when I will have more time to conduct a proper review, comprehensively, from a to z, but here's the conclusion in the interim. We have badly misrepresented his book on this forum. In no way do I now accept as valid, the notion that this is a "Christian" church at Dura Europos, if by "Christian" one equates the Roman Trinitarian version of the gentile sect that split from either Judaism itself, or the Nazarene flavor.

Nor do I accept the notion that Dura Europos had been undiscovered for nearly 2000 years, based on what Clark Hopkins himself, wrote. As for the parchment from the rubbish heap, found nearby, again, the book is enlightening!!!!

Toto

You can always claim that Constantine invented Christianity by redefining the Christianity of the 3rd century as somehow "not Christian." But Christians can't agree on what is True Christianity. My only point is that Constantine did not invent Christianity, he took an existing religion with its inconsistent religious documents and reshaped it more or less for his own purposes.

But I will await your revisiting this in January.

Clivedurdle

Is the role of the trinity an important pointer here? Why would Constantine have used it as the key to his new religion?

Toto

The Trinity is still a contentious doctrine among Christians. It was only a key to Constantine's new religion because he forced it as a compromise.

Sheshbazzar

Same here avi, am looking forward to your review.
Its disturbing that people who should know better, unhesitantly fully buy into the conventional "christian" explanation for everything they see.
My opinion is that the Gentile chrestia cults did not split off from, derive from, nor originate with the Nazarene faith. Rather, tracing the Gentile chrestian/christian theology and its tropes back into antiquity reveals a "flypaper" religion, one whose ideas and doctrines, derived from a wide variety of ancient sources, entirely adapted and syncretized, had been fomenting and fermenting for hundreds of years, a few ideas added in during the first 3 centuries CE were culled from the Jewish Sect of The Nazarenes.
This is why there were so many chrestianities/christianities. In the first century these chrestos cults found in the obscure Jewish personage of "Paul" a convenient sock-puppet talking-head, through whom they were able to further foment their religious ideas.
All that Constantine and his church did was eliminate all of the competing fringe chreistians and force the acceptance of a single "orthodox" christian canon and interpretation- over a LOT of dead bodies.
The Nazarenes had nothing to do with the founding, or the promotion of this Gentile flypaper religion.