mountainman

All of this is off topic. The OP topic is not about the authorship of books the NT canon, but the authorship of the books of the NT non canonical collection. You dont get it do you?


The OP Claim was not this at all. The claim was that C 14 dating result for the Gospel of Judas supports the hypothesis that all the non canonical books were authored at the time of Nicaea. Wake up.


By this utterly absurd logic it follows that there were never ever any original manuscripts. Everything is a copy from a transcendental non existent original. What sort of a world do you live in?



Have you read post # 21 yet?
I am aware of these greek papyri.
And how they have been dated.

stephan huller

But this hasn't been demonstrated or rather it has been put foward in a manner which is totally illogical and would be accepted by no one who knew what they were talking about. Your arguments are beyond flawed. Their are so infuriatingly irrational that it actually causes the rest of us who know what we are talking about to get angry at you for formulating misleading arguments.

You can't get from C 14 dating of the Gospel of Judas to anything resembling an argument for Nicaean authorship. You just can't. It is very unlikely that we have discovered the original Gospel of Judas. It was certainly originally written in Greek and so our surviving Coptic comes from something which existed BEFORE the range of dates.

All the other arguments then which you develop aren't worth considering because this is a non-starter.

Stop wasting your time. Yet another stupid, unworkable argument.

stephan huller

I don't know what to say about this bit of twisted logic. How many published copies of the Bible do you think there have been. And yet none of these published works represents the 'original' copy of any manuscript of any one of the books that make up that collection.

We will never find the original Book of Daniel. We will never find the original Torah. We will likely never find the original of any canonical book.

Why is it that you are so convinced that every non-canonical book that we possess IS the original autograph? This is nothing short of demented.

Toto

But your arguments for a late dating of the noncanonical texts are not at all persuasive, and it appears that your motive is to support your theory that Constantine invented Christianity by pushing the gnostic gospels into the fourth century.

mountainman

Look closely at the upper Error Bound on gJudas




The C14 dating published for gJudas has an upper bound of 340 CE. You should be able to see this clearly on the above graph, which also shows the date of Nicaea. Last time I looked, this date was 15 years after Nicaea. What's your problem with this stephan. Spin is out of his depth, there is nothing wrong with this logic. If there is, I challenge someone to identify the problem.



I agree.


The C14 result suggests for the Coptic translation (of a presumed Greek original) an upper bound of 340 CE. This still leaves a period of 15 years between the years of 325 CE and 340 CE for the Greek original to have been authored, and this is precisely what I conjecture to have happened.

There are 4 steps:

(1) 324/325 CE: Constantine presents the NT Canon to Alexandria

(2) 326 CE: As a result of (1), The Alexandrian Greeks (Graeco-Egypto-Romans) commenced to lampoon and satirize the books of Constantine's NT Canon, by authoring the "far out Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" in Greek, to be performed in Greek, in the Alexandrian theatres of the disbelievers. (Did Jesus kiss Mary? Did Peter make a camel pass through the eye of a needle? Do the apostles travel around on "bright clouds"? Did Paul baptize a talking lion in the wilderness? Does Jesus heal by the power of Asclepius? On and on it goes ....)

(3) 326 CE: As a result of (2) Constantine immediately prohibited these non canonical books, a prohibition which was to last for centuries and centuries. Constantine engaged the army to search out and destroy prohibited books. Their preservation became perilous. They were too easily identifiable in Greek --- translations to Syriac and Coptic may have been considered earlier or later.

(4) 327 to 340 CE: As a result of (3) the Alexandrian Greeks (and probably the entire Alexandrian Pagan priesthood) follow Pachomius to the desert in droves to the "ascetic life" hundreds of miles "out of town" at Nag Hammadi, and collaborate to engage in the publication of a series of codices in Coptic, which purposefully preserves some of these prohibited and heretical Gnostic texts, the Nag Hammadi Codices.





I summarised the detail presentation of my arguments at post #21
(which still remains unaddressed by any of my detractors)
to a series of 4 claims at post #50, where I rated them and discussed them.
(which also still remain unaddressed by any of my detractors)


These claims were:

Claim (1): The manuscript evidence via the Manuscript Tradition supports the theory.

Claim (2): The scientific evidence via the C14 dating tests supports the theory.

Claim (3): The literary evidence via the “Church Fathers & Heresiologists” is rejected by the theory.

Claim (4): The paleographical evidence via dating of Greek papyri fragments is rejected by the theory.

Please address these 4 claims. Which of these do you see as unpersuasive and for what reason?


How many times do I have to repeat that the above arguments for the late dating of the gnostic gospels are derived from first principles and with references to the sources, and in no way, shape or form, rely on the authenticity of the new testament canon itself. How many times do I have to say that for the purposes of defending the hypothesis or theory that the gnostic gospels are post Nicaean, I am happy to allow the canonical gospels to be around in the time of Diocletian.


DISCLAIMER:

For the sake of the OP,
Bullneck did not invent Christianity


For the sake of the OP, we may assume that Constantine did not invent Christianity, because it existed in the rule of Diocletian, and he persecuted the Christians because of the threat he perceived to his favorite divinities of Hercules and Asclepius, from the holy books of these Underground Christians - particularly their very powerful "tetrarchy of gospels". Diocletian may have felt threatened by the leadership of the four gospel authors, and the piety of the bishops. As far as the OP goeth, Constantine did not invent Jesus, but embraced an extant cult.


Get it? Cool with that?

Do I need to repeat it again each time I post on this thread?

Transient

Probably because they are using the usual method of cherry picking what you say and avoiding the questions that you really want to address. They cannot address them to their satisfaction so they beat around the bush for ever and a day - it is quite funny to watch.
These forums get quite boring after a while because everyone is in their own corner sniping away at their "enemies".

spin

Let's face it, if you really want to follow the folly of mountainman, it's no skin of my nose. This theory has been falsified by the Dura Europos data. He is manipulating data in a fraudulent manner, combining two C14 dates that have nothing to do with each other in order to cover up the fact that the first is absolutely no help to him and in all probability is a liability. The curves themselves have nothing to do with C14 data. He simply made them up based on the description of 280 +/- 60 years and 348 +/- 60. They bear no resemblance to carbondating curves. (I've tried to find a scientific analysis of these data, but none have appeared on the web.) And the date 348 CE is a red herring when analyzing the Gospel of Judas. Buyer beware.

He by necessity has to deny all the palaeographical data of all the documents from Oxyrhynchus and Tebtunis which falsified his theory immediately with papyri dated in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. He has to extend his conspiracy theory over three languages, so that Latin and Syriac Aramaic get covered. He explains away the various heresies as fabrications that serve almost no possible purpose.

Arius, he has to redefine away from what the evidence indicates, ie that he was an Alexandrian christian priest who disagreed with his bishop and caused a stink well before the Council of Nicaea. The letter written by Arius to Eusebius of Nicomedia has to be repudiated somehow otherwise this crock of shit is falsified again.

Now we're seeing Mani being revised. Thankfully he's given up trying to ring rubbish from Julian's "Against the Galileans" for Julian clearly believes that Paul and Jesus were real.

When Lactantius launches into a nasty attack against the persecutions of the christians under Diocletian and Galerius, once again mountainman has to deny that there were any persecutions, otherwise yet again his tomfoolery is shown to be poppycock. You'd think that if Lactantius were fabricating it from Trier, people who were alive those few years ago would know that it was rubbish.

Lucian of Samosata mentions christians in four separate paragraphs of his Passing of Peregrinus in unfriendly light, without giving anything useful to make one think christians put the data there. Lucian was writing circa 165 CE.

The general argument to support the mountainman folly is non-existent. Nothing at all props it up (other than mountainman's desires). It doesn't explain anything. It requires modification whenever you look at another problematical area.

Let's see what he can do with this text POxy_3035: it's a warrant internally dated in 256 CE to arrest "Petosarapin of Horus a Christian". We can imagine, "it was a fake planted by Eusebius to trick the people of Oxyrhynchus."

Seriously, if you want to go down with this albatross, go ahead. You, like the proverbial horse, have been led to water, but no-one can make you drink.

And for god's sake do not cite the whole of his rubbish. Once is bad enough.


spin

stephan huller

And the joke is that they don't even believe in his theories (except avi of course who is always confessing he is ignorant, always 'learning,' and always certain Pete is correct' all at the same time in every conversation).

What is the motivation of the other 'defenders of the faith'? Apparently Pete's raising of many 'new questions' about how Christianity is bullshit - the weakest of arguments, the most twisted of rationales - but ever new 'problems,' all of this is worthwhile because the end result is the mocking of the evil religion of Christianity.

This week it is Christianity is 'mocked' in red, next week it is 'ridiculed' in blue. They don't want to think, they don't want to learn anything. They don't even accept mountainman's whole theory (how you can accept PART of a Christianity was wholly invented from scratch in the fourth century is beyond me). But again the search for truth doesn't matters for these people - it is the sport of mocking they enjoy. They see us now engaging in the very thing they want this forum to be about only directed against the big, bad evil church. They can't even conceive of the idea of actually trying to understand something objectively and dispassionately. That would take too much effort, that would take too much time - besides how much time do you want to spend analyzing something that is 'as we all know' is complete bullshit anyway?

Toto

In other words, you think that if no one can disprove your theory at the 99% level of probability, that you win. That's not how it works.


Probably no one has addressed this because it doesn't make any sense. It appears to be a variant of your C14 dating argument, which no one supports,

Again, "fail to definitively disprove" does not equal "support."

This means that since the literary evidence does not support your theory, you reject it as later forgery. You have given no good reason. You didn't even realize that these heresiologists are all Christian apologists.

Again, since paleography does not support your theory, you reject it.

How does this support your theory?

So you claim that Christianity was a unified religion around Diocletian, and no Christian ever held a heretical view until after Constantine? This is even less persuasive than your main argument.


If you keep repeating the same bad arguments again and again without reacting to your critics, I will just close this thread.

avi

hmm...

except that it is an ox, not a horse:

avi