Sheshbazzar

I used the phrase "more-or-less" to indicate that the Constantine/Eusebius revisionism was NOT entirely successful in its attempt at hanging all of these diverse traditions and writings together, this is why the NTs text is fraught with contradictions and impossible to reconcile accounts.
Even the "Orthodox" could never agree on any absolute interpretation of all these conflicting details, so from the beginning there has been a tendency to dissent and separate over "doctrinal issues".

bacht

Agreement from this amateur. I've heard some looney ideas about Christian origins, and at least Pete's theory has been thought through. If it comes down to physical evidence maybe we'll have to wait for future developments?

spin

So where are the non-christian precursors to the healing of the paralytic or the walking on water or the women going to the tomb? You have no basis for your musings, a trait you share with poor mountainman. You have no way of showing almost anything of what you inherit from his folly. He could never show it either. It's all exposition and no facts to back it up, just limp attempts not to deal with the obvious errors of the position.

This is a slightly safer, or mini-, mountainman theory, though with much of the same banally silly rhetoric. It wasn't quite all cooked up by Eusebius at the behest of Constantine: he stitched together earlier ideas into a new garment. A new garment that seemed already whole as evinced by the frescoes in the house church and the fragment of gospel harmony found at Dura Europos.

This Eusebius conspiracy is such a vacuous position for you to be in, it's obviously not one based on reason.


spin

spin

Thinking through means positing a conspiracy which involves creating a religion which gets predated nearly 300 years, starting it with the Arian heresy, writing predated texts in both Greek and Latin which also contain debates about heresy such as gnosticism, montanism, Marcionism, and so on. Texts such as Lucian and M.Aurelius get doctored with short non-kerygmatic references to christians. They invent personages such as the Tarsian tentmaker who writes disgruntled letters to invented proselyte groups through Anatolia and the Aegean. All this is done of course while Eusebius sits at home in his little diocese of Caesarea writing his boring long-winded shallow treatises about christian history. Eusebius is so important that Zosimus doesn't rate him a mention in his New History. What has been thought through about a conspiracy theory that only works because it has few means of being falsified?

Funny thing about the notion of falsification: no matter what comes up in the future if the theory has been falsified extra facts don't change it. Christianity prior to 257CE is impossible if Eusebius invented it. As we have plain evidence that christianity existed prior to 257CE, then Eusebius didn't invent christianity.


spin

Sheshbazzar

Returning to J-Ds question

The worlds concepts of what constitutes "Christian beliefs" and ideas was ever after skewed and colored by Constantine's promotion of HIS particular version and form of Christianity, and his regime's violent suppression of all of the diverse earlier forms of the "Christian" faith.
I do not say that there were no "christians" prior to Constantine and Eusebius, rather that there were, but outside of their relating similar parabels and passion stories, they were strangers to that Orthodox religion invented by Constantine that we are now familiar with in its various guises.
Constantine had these original Christians hunted down and slaughtered to impose his will upon the people.

mountainman

Hello spin are you deaf?

You have been away some time. One important thread that you missed was called Parallels between Jesus and Asclepius (The God of Medicine - Gerald Hart). One might be tempted to form the conclusion that you are for some obscure reason totally ignoring the non-christian archaeological support for the Healing god Asclepius. A reasonable amount of data was furnished in support of the popularity of Ascepius, and also, in this thread. Here is a summary of arguments made by the author Gerald D. Hart in his book Asclepius: The God of Medicine:
On the one hand the archaeological evidence for canonical christianity is dismal, with not one clear unambiguous citation. On the other hand, the citations to the existence of the Asclepius healing tradition, for the millenium 500 BCE to 500 CE can be measured in their thousands. The Healer in antiquity was Asclepius.

Best wishes,


Pete

bacht

Thanks. You gave me a better answer than my question deserved :redface:

I don't accept conspiracy theories in general, I think I told Pete that. I'm also leery of the modern tendency to assume evil motives of all religious institutions.

The attractiveness of his theory is the highlighting of pious forgery/pseudepigraphy in the development of the canon, and the scarcity of physical remains for early Christian activity. Too many believers bruit the "historicity" of Jesus and his followers as some kind of "proof" for their faith. It's good to be reminded that real people with real agendas produced the artifacts we have.

Toto

If Pete were willing to reframe his theory as Eusebius and Constantine "dramatically changed and reshaped" Christianity, instead of "inventing" Christianity, it would not be that controversial. In fact, I think that most people would actually agree with that.

But he clings to the statement that Eusebius forged everything, although now he seems willing to concede that there were previous exemplars of Christian documents, but they were from some other religion.

If Pete were willing to call that other religion Christianity, the whole controversy would be solved.

Clivedurdle

This may be entirely a definitional dabate - when is xianity xianity?

I assume we are agreed we do have xianity post Constantine?

But what do we have before?

Good shepherd - warning - isn't that Apollo?
Fish Jesi of various types
A motif of walking in water - hmm.

I wrote how a mosaic on the Isle of Wight was said to be xian because it had the four evangelists signs in the corners, but the centre was a classic Roman tale. Is that really xian?

I think pre Constantine we should be talking about proto xianities, various mergings and mixing of beliefs of various strength of assertion - we may be looking at fossils that became xianity, but not necesarily xianity.

patcleaver

Spin, I voted no because you have not made your case that Dura-Europos falsifies MM's hypotheses.

1. The good Sheppard was a common pagan theme.

2. I have no reason to think that walking on water was not a common pagan theme.

3. I have no reason to think that women visiting a tomb was not a common pagan theme.

I live in a Christian society, which has resulted in a bias that seems like common sense, so my initial reaction was that these images were Christian, but in fact, we have no evidence at all to think that these images were not pagan or Jewish in Dura-Europos in 250.

4. The only citation you gave us to show that the fragment was Christian was a book that claims that the fragment is part of the Diatessaron. That citation does not provide a translation of the fragment, and does not provide a translation of the Diatessaron that we can compare it to. Then you admit that it is no longer believed to be a fragment of the Diatessaron. Where is the evidence that this is a Christian document. Why do you think it is unlikely to be either a pagan document or a Jewish document. Can you show us where it unambiguously refers to Jesus of Nazareth.

Spin, the evidence you provided about Dura-Europos is inadequate to falsify MM’s hypotheses

-------------------

MM claims that the gJudas was produced after 325 either by Eusebius or by others in reaction to the canonical gospels that Eusebius produced. However, the C14 data indicates that the most likely date of production of the gJudas copy that we have is 290 with a standard deviation of 30 years, and thus, there is only a 16% chance that the copy of gJudas we have was produced after 325.

It is highly unlikely that we have the original copy of gJudas or a copy made immediately after the authorship of gJudas. The average age of authorship of popular books in a modern libraries is probably around 20 years. Thus, its reasonable to believe that gJudas was most probably authored around 270.

gJudas proves that its very unlikely that Eusebius invented the entire Christian story himself because it is very likely that at least gJudas existed before Constantine commissioned Eusebius to produce any christian works.

I have not read it, but my understanding is that gJudas clearly refers to Jesus of Nazareth. I do not know if gJudas claims that all the thological necessary beliefs of Christianity are true. If it could be established that gJudas defines Christianity and that there was a community of people before 325 who believed that gJudas was non-fiction, then we could show that Christianity existed before Eusebius.

--------------------

Is it irrational to research and argue for a theory that you think best fits the data, even if there seems to be contradictory data?

Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” in 1859. Charles Lyell published “Principles of Geology” in 1863 which claimed that the earth was millions of years old. Both theories were controversial and most Scientists did not immediately accept these theories . By 1869, there were huge amounts of fossil evidence proving evolution of the species, and huge amounts of geological evidence that the earth was very old which was necessary for evolution to be possible.

However, in 1869 the pre emanate scientist of the age, Lord Thomas Kelvin, published "Of Geological Dynamics", (1869) which falsely proved that the sun could not be more than 10,000 years old. From Newton’s laws, Lord Kelvin knew the weight of the sun and estimated its heat output and determined that it was impossible for any chemical reaction to produce enough energy to sustain the heat output of the sun for more than about 10,000 years. The scientists of the day immediately accepted Lord Kelvan’s assessment, and the consensus of science was that old earth geology and evolution were falsified and completely refuted.

Based on the geological data geologists accepted the ancient earth theory, and based on the geological data and fossil data, biologists accepted evolution, but other scientists rejected these theories as impossible.

Einstein published his hypotheses which came to be called the special theory of relativity in 1905, and his hypotheses was verified in 1919 by the bending of light around the sun. However nobody at that time connected this to the solar power generation problem. Sir Arthur Eddington in 1920, based on the difference of weights between hydrogen and helium, was the first to propose that the source of the sun’s energy was fusion. Eddington’s hypotheses explained how the sun could produce energy for billions of years, but he could not prove that fusion was even possible. Eddington had shown that old earth geology and evolution were possible, but nobody knew if they were likely or not. Hans Bethe in 1939 published a paper based on accelerator data and mathematical modeling that proved that the source of the energy of the sun was nuclear fusion, and Lord Kelvin’s claims of impossibility of evolution and ancient earth were refuted.

Between 1869 and 1920 the consensus of science was that an ancient earth and evolution were impossible. However, the geologists and biologists continued to search for evidence and argue for those theories because these theories explained the data in geology and biology better than any other theory.

----------------------

I do not think it is at all irrational or illegitimate for MM to investigate his hypotheses and argue for his hypotheses. In fact, I think his presentation of his hypotheses provides an excellent target for atheists and theists to try to disprove. If Bible Scholars can not even disprove MM’s hypotheses, it shows there is something seriously wrong with Bible studies. MM has admitted many times that his scenario is merely an hypotheses, and at least once he has admitted that it is not even more probable than not.

MM’s interprets Arius’ statement “There was time when He was not” as a claim by Arius that Jesus is fictional .I do not think that MM’s interpretation of Arius’ statement is reasonable. If you are going to assume the historicity that Arius made such as statement then you’re going to have to assume the historicity of the context in which it was said. I think that MM’s interpretation of that statement is embarrassingly wrong in view of the context of the documents where it is found.

MM should present his hypotheses with more wishy-washy terms. He does not seem to have enough scientific training to consistently use terms, such as, “probably” and “possibly” and “I propose” and “I speculate” to describe his hypotheses. I am especially annoyed that someone might read his posts, and in view of his absolute language, to think he is a crank because sometimes he seems to be claiming that his hypotheses is infallible instead of just being one among many possible explanations of the evidence. I think this wastes a lot of other peoples time on useless arguments.

My biggest objection against MM is that he says way more than he needs to - all we usually need is a short blurb to remind us of his hypotheses and how it relates to the topic.

Another objection is that his presentations of his hypotheses are often far off the topic of the forum that they are presented in. I have the same problem with spin’s responses to MM’s posts – spin often goes far off topic to try to argue against some post by MM that is irrelevant to the topic and should just be ignored.