Toto

What part of forgery and fiction do you not understand?

The gospels are anonymous, and read at times like Hellenistic fiction, at times like mythology. They do not describe their sources in any fashion that would lead one to think that they are history, as opposed to theology.

Paul's letters cannot be dated with any accuracy, and have been massaged and interpolated to the point where it is not clear what he said. And Paul mostly operated outside of Palestine.

What part of the NT in particular do you think is so convincing on the question of whether there were Christians in Palestine before the 4th century?

Chris Weimer

Yes, just like Homer. Yet we know a little about the Trojan Wars...

Chris Weimer

You contradict yourself here.

Obfuscation - that's clearly not what is happening. Paul's letters have not been interpolated to the degree that you make them out to be - such cases that have tried to demonstrate so have utterly failed. That's the mark of a desperate man - to deny that it even exists.

For anything that may be made up in Acts, it's ridiculous to think that it contains absolutely no information about the time which it talks about.

Toto

There is one Christian who can be placed in Jerusalem in the mid to late second century - Bishop Melito of Sardis, who traveled to Jerusalem to see where it all supposedly started. But none of his writings on this survive, so we don't know if he saw other Christians there.

Toto

I don't see a contradiction?

It would not take that much interpolation to remove Paul from Jerusalem altogether. He mostly operated outside of Palestine. He records a few visits to the Jerusalem Church, but it has been suggested that this was Marcion writing his own struggles with the Roman authorities back into Paul's story.

And I don't know why you summarily dismiss the work of scholars such as William Walker. The case for at least some interpolaions into Paul's letters is pretty convincing.

I am willing to say that Acts contains some information about the time it discusses. Many novels contain valuable historical information. But most of Acts happens outside of Jerusalem and outside of Palestine.

mountainman

Pohlsander, in his The Emperor Constantine (or via: amazon.co.uk), 1996, writes about Constantine's mother-in-law Eutropia.

The "Holy Places" in "The Holy Land" were "pagan"
and needed to be "purified" = Basilica over the top.

"Among the places visited by Eutropia was Mamre (nr Hebron),
a holy place to Jews and Christians because here, according to
Genesis 18, Abraham had hospitably entertained three divine
messengers in the shade of an oak tree or terebinth. The lady
found that this holy place was defiled by pagan rites as well as
by secular activities. She reported to Constantine, who at
once ordered the place to be purified and a church to be built there. The church was completed by 333. Remnants of
the outer walls exist to this day, and we know that the atrium
contained Abraham's altar, the well and the tree.
Remnants of that tree were still seen by St. Jerome.

Constantine's building activities in Palestine gave to that
country a central place in Christian sentiments which it had
never had before; they in fact made it the "Holy Land."

Like he dealt with the ancient Obelisk of Karnack, Constantine ripped the
ancient foundations out of the world, and established new
foundations for a new Roman (not Graeco-Egyptian) imperial
age.



Pete Brown
Authors of Antiquity

Johnny Skeptic

In "The Rise of Christianity," in chapter 1, Rodney Stark discusses early archeological and papyrylogical evidence of Christianity, but I forget what he said, except that he claims that that evidence shows that first century Christians were very few in number, contrary to what many conservative Christians claim. If Jesus did not perform miracles, and did not rise from the dead, a very small first century Christian church is understandable.