Jedi Mind Trick

Interesting that allegedly Paul preached about exactly this god by name in Athens.

ETA: Show no Mercy beat me to this observation.

dog-on

With regards to what?

The surviving writings are just more evidence of theological battles about the exact nature of a literary character.

mountainman

The big picture of the history and politics
of "Early Christianity" and its New Testament.


A further question:

IF I could establish a decent and reasonable argument
that none of the Gnostic NT related books existed before the
Council of Nicaea, but were in fact all authored shortly after
that date, would this in your mind have any bearing on how
we view the big picture of the history and politics of "Early
Christianity" and its New Testament.

show_no_mercy

It's kind of a weird pericope. Why would these Greeks be unaware of the Christian god if he was supposed to be one and the same to the Hebrew god? The Greeks most certainly knew about the Jews and their god...

dog-on

Perhaps, but it would not change the fact that Christians and Jews worship distinct gods.

dog-on

It is just a little slap at the Marcionites and perhaps other heretics.

Clivedurdle

Don't forget that many Jews saw Greek ideas as the future - this is what the wars of the Maccabees were about.

And this true god false god stuff is Zarathustran, in its modern form the Bogomils and some fascinating goings on in Languedoc.

There are very strong reasons for orthodoxy to suppress these ideas.

But the platonic dualist idea of the true false world - glass darkly - (Pagels) is a few mileninia diversion that probably delayed us working out - as Darwin eventually did - that there aren't any outside forces, souls or breaths or true species. (See Max Ernst).

Toto

IF you could establish that flying saucers landed in Rome in 30 CE, that would have some bearing on the history of early Christianity. But you haven't established anything more about your proposed late date for the gnostics than you have about flying saucers.

If you have any decent arguments, please just state them, rather than hinting around.

mountainman

Perhaps?


No of course not. I am not out to address "that fact". The NT and the LXX are different books which were authored by different people for entirely different purposes centuries apart. I am here interested in the people who were responsible for the authorship of the gThomas, the NHC and the NT apocrypha who might be called the "Gnostic Heretics".

mountainman

In many threads such as Arius of Alexandria and Leucius Charinus are one in the same author I have stated these. But as we know people are not interested in their discussion. I am trying to determine why their is such a lack of interest in such an ancient historical possibility.

We are allowing the heresiologists to date the authorship of the books of the very vile heretical gnostics --- their most hated and damned oppositional authors who wrote nasty vile pernicious fiction against the Historical Jesus. As a result, we currently "believe as fact" that (according to Eusebius) some of the non canonical acts were authored before Nicaea. It seems reasonable to suspect however that all this authorship happened as a direct result of Constantine publishing his bible - and raising the christian cult out of an obscurity (which is itself yet to be fathomed) to the state religion effectively overnight (See Barnes) c.324 CE.

Other arguments against this idea must include the existence of papry fragments of the NT Apocrypha which are currently believed to be independently dated to the pre-Nicene epoch. There are a few of these that an argument needs to address, but again, we are dealing with a paleographical assertion.

The primary evidence itself - the manuscript tradition and C14 dating citations - agrees with the argument, since the earliest strands of evidence for the hundred or so source texts which now constitute the NT Apocryohal corpus all are perceived to be fourth century greek, latin, coptic and/or syriac.

To be specific, many of the NTA are known to have been authored after Nicaea, so I only need to address the argument to those few texts - numbering perhaps about 20 or 30 which are often cited as being "early".

This is another issue that I have rarely seen addressed. We know nothing about these vile heretical gnostics. And yet the orthodox want us to believe that they have been in operation authorship mode for three centuries, with some texts being written in the 2nd, some in the 3rd and some in the 4th century. Three hundred years of authorship and preservation (100 to 400) implies that there should be something known about these people. That we know - at this stage - virtually nothing about these author(s) and that nobody (especially the heresiologists) mentions them by NAME and DATE is very intriguing to the historian.

My argument suggests that the period of authorship might be as narrow as the period between the years 325 and 336 CE, that the bulk of the NT apocrypha were authored by that Alexandrian Arius - a greek gnostic and heretic who opposed Constantine at the time Constantine arrived with his Bible, and the supreme imperial political power to edict for the damatio memorae of any political opposition.