mountainman

In the footnotes to my 2007 thesis:

Examples of forgery cited in antiquity include Josephus: "Alexander protested that this letter was
forged by Diophantus, the king's secretary, a man without scruples and very clever at imitating any
hand" ..[later we learn he was].. . "executed for forgery” (JW, 4). Suetonius writes that “the emperor
Titus could compose speeches and verses in Greek or Latin with equal ease, and actually extemporised
them on occasion. ... It often amused him to compete with his secretaries at shorthand writing, or so I
have heard; and he claimed that he could imitate any handwriting in existence and might have been the
most celebrated forger of all time.”. (Titus 3).

Neither does the boss of the army prison. Robin Lane Fox provides a translation of an Oration delivered by Constatine in which he seems to state that there were certain skeptics about who were in UNBELIEF over the Sibyline's oracular transmission concerning the immanent birth of Jesus H. These skeptics suspected that one of the Christians had forged the Sibyl's prophecy.


Lane Fox calls it a fraud twice over, and I agree. In fact I'd go one step further and say that Constantine's forgery mill was in full production with the New Christian Revolution under Commander Constantine. Business opportunities with Constantine's 318 Nicaean Fathers were the best on offer. Not that they were good. They were just the only ones on offer. Dig?



There is good reason to expect that it may have been just a rebadging of the well known (old) Logos of Heraclitus with the ("new and strange") Logos of Jesus (via Plotinus) and the Twelve Boneheads plus G'Day Dear Paul. We'll even throw in a Transcendental Underground Green Low Profile Early Church, in which the names of the 3rd century christian lineage bear an strangely suspicious correspondence with the names from the 3rd century Platonic lineage.

The Christians were about to suppress the F**K out of the Graeco of the Graeco-Roman empire. They were about as antihellenistic as monotheistic Zorastrians under Ardashir in Persia a century earlier. The Christians found in their Holy Writ that they must convert the Greeks and other Gentiles.

There was a revolution in the way of thinking in the Roman Empire.

Book burning was back.


Times were dark. Any humor was buried deep. Verbotten. Enter the gnostic heretics.

The cross lo and behold talks with god and dances with wolves.

There's alot more letters from the 4th century forgery mill to cite.

sotto voce

But what you have to find, as already implied, is concrete evidence that the Bible— in practice, the whole of it— was forged. The NT follows organically from the OT, quoting or citing it on almost every page. So that's a fair mountain to climb, surely.

mountainman

Arius of Alexandria, and all the Arians following him, said that "Jesus was created out of nothing". I can reject the claim that this is a statement of theology and instead accept the claim that this is a statement of historicity.

And then we have within a generation of Nicaea the following little whistle-blowing outbust from the Emperor Julian writing "Against the Christians":

It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind
the reasons by which I was convinced that
the fabrication of the Galilaeans
is a fiction of men composed by wickedness.

Though it has in it nothing divine,
by making full use of that part of the soul
which loves fable and is childish and foolish,
it has induced men to believe
that the monstrous tale is truth.

The fabricators of the NT canon obviously had, opened in Greek before them, the LXX. We know their modus operandi.

That the NT was an expedient and pious forgery commissioned by the Lord God Caesar and Pontifex Maximus explains the patterns of positive and negative evidence available in the field of "Early Christian literature".

After the widespread publication of the imperial bible, since the sword was useless, the Alexandrian Greeks picked up the pen. In a parallel fashion the fabricators of the Gnostic Gospels and Acts etc had, opened before them in Greek, the LXX, the canonical new testament and later, other Gnostic literature.

sotto voce

Or not.

Or not. Julian may have merely taken the view that Christianity cramped his personal style, and his outburst owed everything to that, rather than to any intellectual conviction.

This is not concrete evidence.

It is known that the LXX existed before Constantine's supposed vision. It is known that the LXX existed before the 1st century. It is not known that the NT owed anything of its existence to the LXX.

Who is 'we'?

So the Lord God and Pontifex Maximus could not agree?

Why was the sword useless?

Toto

Hello Pete - this is beyond tiresome. You keep reposting those quote-mined snippets from Arius and Julian without dealing with the clear evidence that Julian believed that there had been a historical Jesus - an obscure failed prophet who was crucified and stayed dead.

Your only defense of your bizarre interpretation of Arius' words is that we don't know what he originally wrote in any case.

This board is for discussion. Merely repeating the same talking points without engaging the opposition is not discussion.

You've got your own webpage where you can push your theories. You are abusing this site.

mountainman

The strangely duplicated theologian Origen may be cited for his Hexapla.



This knowledge has two forms of evidence:

(1) The Legend of the Ptolemaic LXX a la the letter of Aristeas in Josephus and its repitition by Anatolius via Eusebius, and

(2) A small number of palaeographically dated papyrus fragments.

This knowledge is this not one might call secure.



But the NT quote-mines the Greek LXX.
What is happening?



For Christ's sake read Ammianus.

Those who opposed the bible c.350 CE were subject to army operated inquisitions. The sword was thus useless to the heretics. Their only avenue of objection was to take up the pen. See the Nag Hammadi Codices.

mountainman

This is false. We have discussed this and you are in error with the statement above on the basis that you are not able to cite any form of clear evidence whatsoever. There is NO CLEAR Evidence surrounding the literature of Julian. It is a GREY AREA. We know he was censored by Cyril. Nothing about what Julian believed is clear. My arguments that Julian may have believed that the Christian literature was a fabrication and a fiction cannot be conclusively dismissed.


This is a blatantly false statement. You are being summarily dismissive of a large amount of research and external scholarship that I have over the years brought to this forum that is directly related to Arius of Alexandria. Arius was the subject of imperial "damnatio memoriae".

I am quite prepared to engage your opposing arguments if they are based on the evidence. But you are making false statements about the evidence.

Admittedly my interpretation of the evidence is novel but that does not make it wrong. Arguments from the hegemony are not regarded as conclusive as far as I am concerned, and you appear to be arguing from the authority of the hegemony. Nothing about the history of christian origins is certain. Discussion of theories of pious forgery are not a waste of time IF the new testament was actually fabricated and not just received from the hands of the Twelve Boneheads and Paul in the 1st century following the ascension of the Historical Jesus to the Mothership in geostationary orbit above the cloudbanks over Jerusalem.

steve_bnk

'...Why don't we abandon any hope of knowing anything about a possible historical Jesus, ..'

What else to talk about?

Toto

I have previously cited this, from Against the Galileans

Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement. . . . for nowhere did either Jesus or Paul hand down to you such commands. The reason for this is that they never even hoped that you would one day attain to such power as you have; for they were content if they could delude maidservants and slaves, and through them the women, and men like Cornelius ⁶⁶ and Sergius.

Is there any reason to claim that Julian charged that Christianity was a fiction of men composed in wickedness, but reject the above paragraph? No, there is not.


But you are not discussing anything. You are repeating your favorite quotes without developing any arguments. You can't explain why Constantine would have ordered such a bad story to be forged, with so many holes in it, that Julian would later reject it after being raised a Christian.

Have you actually read anything by Julian after that opening paragraph? Does anything else there support your argument in the least?

sotto voce

As scholars for hundreds of years* have concluded, the authors, who wrote in Greek, used the then commonly used Greek translation (though not exclusively). This does not mean a) that they used the LXX, or even Hebrew texts, as a source of ideas; b) that the LXX should be supposed a reliable translation, as many like to be thought true; and c) that the books translated to form the LXX were necessarily canonical, as many like to be thought true. One may confidently assume that the NT authors quoted selectively, and regarded the LXX with great caution, as genuine scholars do today. The notion that they fabricated the Gospels out of the OT is not worth attention.

*That is, since scholarship was permitted, by people who actually took note of the Bible's morality. If those who made use of freedom of expression were to acknowledge the source of their freedom, they might have to change their whole stance regarding history, might they not.