rdg

I was wondering what the forum members have to say about Fomenko's view of history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chr..._%28Fomenko%29

I began to become interested in Fomenko a few years ago when I was researching the scholarly literature on whether the writings of Tacitus genuinely go back to the first century, or are merely 15th century forgeries. It was sobering to realize that I honestly did not know what the hell the clergy were doing with manuscripts during the middle ages, and therefore, they could have easily created some fraudulent document which escaped the jeers of gainsayers and then became accepted as authentic history afterward. Further research convinced me that forgery was common and it would have been near impossible back then to decisively expose any forgery. Constantine's Donation comes to mind. I have to wonder whether there have been other "Donations" that we currently accept as gospel truth, but which aren't.

Even if Fomenko is wrong, it is still intriguing to be reminded that most of us accept the popular view on blind faith. Most people don't know why exactly the current year is 2013, but they'd google the answer and then post it on the internet as if they knew all along if asked. And more than most people never read the criticisms of popular historical chronology. Most people have viewed popular historical chronology as infallible and untouchable. Probably because to suggest it is wrong could end up ringing a bell that cannot be unrung.

I only read the first 15 or so pages of Fomenko's first volume, and I was impressed at how much material he had. From the reviews at amazon.com, I was expecting far less. Even if his conclusion is too dogmatic and not everything we know from ancient history was created in the middle ages, that doesn't mean the popular chronology is as accurate as we currently presume.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

mountainman

Jean Hardouin (1646-1729)

From Bossuet to Newman, Owen Chadwick, Second Edition, Cambridge, 1987 (1957):

Its unclear to me what he means by Ecclesiastical writers. But if by Ecclesiastic writers we assuming Hardouin meant the authors of the gospels, acts and Paul's letters, and the mass of church father writings labelled "Eusebius", I think the theory is untenable.

Besides the Christian archaeology IMO there exists a "silver bullet" for this revised chronology with respect to the new testament literary evidence, and that is the gJudas C14 test results of 290 CE plus or minus 60 years. A codex (Coptic) telling a story about Jesus and the Twelve Daimons therefore appears to have been manufactured by gnostics in the 3rd or early 4th century. It is reasonable to infer that these authors had the canonical Jesus stories before them when they wrote. Most historians and biblical scholars make this assumption.

This chronological evidence effectively appears to rule out the possibility that the 'the impious crew', 'maudite cabale' fabricated this stuff in the 13th or 14th century. It just moves the upper bound (latest) possible chronology of the authorship operation to a thousand years earlier.

Roger Pearse

There are several problems with dating Tacitus to the 15th century. The key ones are that the two Medici manuscripts, which transmit to us Annals 1-6, 11-16, and the Histories, date from the 8th and 11th centuries. They can be dated by paleography.

The process whereby paleography came into being is not widely known and bears repetition.

After the Counter-Reformation, in 18th century France, the various religious orders fought for their privileges like cats in a sack. A Jesuit Father asserted that various charters, which granted lands and privileges to the Benedictine and Dominican orders, were in fact forged. One in particular was supposedly by the Merovingian king Dagobert, from the 6th century. The point of all this was that if the charters were not valid, then the lands would revert to the crown.

The Dominicans saw this as a political attack, as indeed it was, and appealed to the inquisition. The Benedictines in France had reorganised after the wars into the Congregation of St. Maur, and achieved levels of scholarship which are still impressive today; and they saw the claim as a challenge to their academic abilities. The task of dealing with the matter was assigned to Dom Jean Mabillon.

What Mabillon did was compile a large dossier of charters which had dates at the bottom of them. He collected them by period of history, and by geography, believing that the handwriting would vary over time and space. Once this dossier existed, the forgeries became instantly obvious; they were written in a handwriting of a later period from the date at the bottom. And the dossier also showed what the REAL handwriting was that was used for writing legal documents at the period in question, backed up by a wide range of examples. The volume of data excluded the idea of tampering by individuals in the past. Mabillon also found that the handwriting varied by date more than by geography.

Mabillon published his dossier, with plates, and his arguments, as De re diplomatica. It was an instant hit, convincing everyone including the Jesuit who had raised the issue in the first place. It did, unfortunately, show that the charter of Dagobert was indeed a forgery, as were a number of important early charters. (Although it should be added that some of them were merely later copies of a real agreement, or the writing down later of agreements made originally with an illiterate king).

Some years later his colleague Dom Bernard de Montfaucon did the same exercise for Greek paleography, and coined the term.

The process for creating paleography for any language groups is still the same; assemble a dossier of dated and dateable manuscripts.

Obviously the date-ranges are not that small; a period of a century or two can be involved. But it was the first step to a scholarly way of dating the medieval copies, and it works quite well. Even I can do it. :-)

Not really, because of the different circumstances. People create forgeries for money and power. Most medieval forgeries relate to one or the other (e.g. the forged decretals, intended to keep local barons off clergy backs in medieval France). The forgery of ancient literary texts does not become profitable until the renaissance; and the forgeries of that period are not likely to deceive us today.

In the Middle Ages, people copy books because it is the only way to get a copy of a book. Books are rare. Books are expensive. Books don't circulate much. So even if you did tamper with a copy, who are you hurting? Only yourself. You can't duplicate copies of it and send them round ... people don't do that. This sort of thing has to wait for the age of printing (mostly! -- there are exceptions, such as the dodginess at the Council of Florence).

What they usually did, when confronted with a possible forgery -- and remember, people only forge stuff where there is controversy, and so people worry about forgery -- was to look for other copies.

The Donation of Constantine may not be a forgery as such, or not in intention. It was written in the 6th century, when order was breaking down completely in Italy, and the Popes were trying desperately to hold off Lombard robber-barons who were devastating the peninsula, and exert some kind of control over the remaining Eastern Roman/Greek garrisons in places like Ravenna, run by an indifferent exarch. At that time everyone "knew" that Constantine had made a donation of power to the Pope. You can easily imagine that some papal clerk, asked to produce the document but unable to find it, grabbing some parchment and writing down what everyone "knew" existed, as a means to show to some reluctant Greek garrison commander so that they could hold off the attackers.

The later history of the document, as an excuse for medieval claims, was undoubtedly not in anyone's mind. And it is, of course, quite bogus.

The same is true of everything we know, surely, on every subject, except for the small areas of knowledge on which we ourselves have gone to the primary data? It is certainly a problem, but it is probably an inevitable one. But there is a logical fallacy here; to treat a general problem as if it was a problem specifically with one thing is to engage in fraudulent argument. This is a common trick among populist debunkers, so watch out for it. Always ask, when confronted with some argument, whether the same debunking logic would apply equally to more things than just the item presented to us by the author. If it does, skip that bit of the argument.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

Perhaps some Fomenkonik could explain the continuity of the British monarchy, which goes back at least to c.800 with the reign of Beorhtric supported by coins and before that literary evidence including a history by the Northumbrian Bede (written c.730) of a series of smaller realms often in conflict.

Just as a starter the daughter of Mercian king Offa c.800, Eadburh, had an opportunity to marry Charlemagne. Edmund I (ruled: 920-946) was brother-in-law of the Roman Emperor Otto I. These crossovers between Britain and Europe help provide a bridge that supports each chronology. Fomenko needs to fold each chronology uniformly, so that the crossovers also function.

One could also look at the continuity of the Byzantine empire and its crossovers in Europe.

I've seen this sort of nonsense before, starting with Velikovsky and reaching to David Rohl. "Everyone has the chronology wrong!" Yeah, sure. I guess the archaeological sequences and the coins are wrong as well.

mountainman

Did you manage to have a look through The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus by Arthur Drews - The Roman Witnesses; Section 2. Tacitus.

For those who might be interested at which point in history death by fire was introduced as a form of punishment by the Roman State, you will find these laws appearing under the rule of Constantine in the 4th century, at which time the stories of the Christian martyrs were authored.

Roger Pearse

Likewise poisoning was not a form of career advancement recognised under Roman law in the period in question, which in fact prescribed severe penalties for this kind of activity. That proves, at least if we believe Arthur Drew, that Nero never came to the throne AT ALL! And that his mother Agrippina wasn't murdered, as the sources slanderously say!

Doubtless all this shows that the Christians lied about that too. "String 'em up now. It's the only language they understand. I 'ad that Richard Dawkins in the back of the cab once." (with apologies to Private Eye).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

Hmm, poisoning.... The well, of course. Nobody was talking about Roman law, so Roger decided to derail the issue. While mixing metaphors, I should point out that Roger is trying to construct a straw man argument, but lacks the raw materials and the technical expertise here to do so. His discussion of "law" is irrelevant. Nero got to the throne because his predecessor was, umm, poisoned, just as his rival was. Poisoning was a well-known method at the time. But burning people wasn't recorded up to the time. Ordinary people tended to get crucified or put to the sword. We should consider Drews's observation with a little more care than what Roger does, that human torches et al. suggest an imagination exalted by reading stories of the later Christian martyrs.

What started off poorly finished even more poorly: bad premises give way to tedious sarcasm.

The usual persecutor's victim humor.

Roger clings to the belief that a passage unknown in antiquity in a text preserved by christian scribes featuring punishments that don't fit the era has just gotta be good and true and veracious and trustworthy. Roger probably believes in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy as well.

tanya

Thank you rdg, for introducing an important dimension into the discussion: how much faith should we have, that the "ancient" documents, are really genuine?

I had suggested, in another thread, several days ago, that the famous papyrus fragment from Dura Europos, believed to include a portion of Tatian's Diatessaron, could have been left there by the troops of Emperor Julian II in 363 CE, as they traveled down the Euphrates, en route to Ctesiphon. They spent several months, on this campaign, and it seems to me, reasonable to assume that they stopped at the ancient fortress town of Dura, and there left behind, as debris, various documents, including the fragment we know today, as Dura parchment 24. The provenance of this document is questionable, as Clark Hopkins makes clear in his text, as it was "found" on top of dirt which had been excavated from somewhere, at some time prior to its identification.

I do not accept Fomenko's conclusions, if only because I believe that his observations about Genghis Khan and Timur the lame are incorrect. Genetic studies confirm a high percentage of Mongols today, bearing Genghis Khan's y chromosome markers.

aa5874

Roger where did you get your imaginative fiction story that the the Donation of Constantine may not be a forgery?? How is it you now know what everybody should have known??

It is most remarkable that you are now inventing explanations under the pretense that the Donation of Constantine may not really be a forgery.

It is mind-boggling how people here can attempt to re-write history based on their imagination knowing full well that their imagination is contrary to the evidence.

Roger Pearse

From a scholarly discussion of the possible origins of the document. It had to come into existence somehow. This asked all the obvious questions. When did the document get composed? Why did it happen? Who did it? In what context could it have been fabricated? What were the motives? The answers are inevitably speculative to some degree, but the 6th century is the answer that came out.

I regret that I can't give you a reference, but I probably found it via the English translation of Lorenzo Valla's proof that the document wasn't authentic. I have no view on the question, of course; I offered it for information. Sorry if it upset you.

Apparently the idea of the donation was floating around in late Roman circles well before the donation as we have it can have come into being, or so my source indicated. Probably in hagiographical texts? (I read this a dozen years ago, so pardon my vagueness).

Well! I am mildly surprised to find someone emotionally invested in the statement that the donation of Constantine is a forgery, rather than merely a mistake or whatever.

I have no such view. Men have forged documents throughout history for their own selfish purposes, or even for what they believed to be benevolent purposes. That they have done so we know. That they will continue to do so I believe (you may believe different, if you regard that as speculation). That this is evidence of anything other than that human beings are human seems to me rather doubtful.

We must all think for ourselves, I suggest.

All the best,

Roger Pearse