Ben C Smith

Emphasis added for the confused.

Ben.

aa5874

[QUOTE=Ben C Smith;5276909]Emphasis added for the confused.

Please note the deviation from "Christian Church" to "house churches by Paul".

And again, Gamera never mentioned the source for his information about "the house churches of Paul that were roughly at Philo's time".

Amaleq13

The source is explicitly given as "by Paul" which, of course, means the letters attributed to Paul. If you meant to ask which letters and how the dating was established, you did a poor job of it because your actual (repeated) request makes it seem as though you either did not read or did not understand the post.

aa5874

What source explicitly makes a reference to churches by Paul and Christian Churches in Philo's time?

And please note that Philo never mentioned any Christian churches during his own time in all his extant writings.

Amaleq13

:banghead: Surely you cannot be ignorant of Paul's explicit references to the churches to whom he wrote? Why pretend you don't know what is being referred to here?

Who would be so foolish as to expect him to mention groups that apparently gathered in private homes?

Jeffrey Gibson

So far as I can tell, he never mentions Pharisaic gatherings either, let alone Pharisees, or the temples to pagan gods that Herod erected in Caersarea Maritima, or explicitly Herod's temple or the synagogues in Jerusalem.

So on your own grounds for determining whether something mentioned in other sources existed -- namely, that Philo has to have mentioned it -- these things didn't exist either.

Jeffrey

aa5874

May I remind you that we dealing with the christian churches mentioned by Eusebius in Alexandria, started by someone called Mark the disciple of Peter.

I don't call Eusebius foolish, I call him a blatant liar.

Eusebius in Church History 2.16 I think it was foolish for Eusebius to write fiction about Philo.

Ben C Smith

My apologies to the board for not nipping this one in the bud; I had not been following every single post on the thread. A few more recent statements (or, more precisely, boldfaced emphases within those statements) had me scratching my head until I traced the problem back to post 774.

What Eusebius does is to call Philo a man very much celebrated by many of our own, that is, Christians. Note that our own pronoun, whose scope has to include Eusebius himself, by definition, since it is a first person pronoun.

Lurkers can read for themselves how many records remain from early Christians up to the time of Eusebius who refer to Philo. Keep in mind that these references are only those that remain out of all the Christian literature written during those first three centuries:

Clement of Alexandria, about 5 mentions of Philo.
Origen of Alexandria, about 15 mentions of Philo.
Pseudo-Justin, about 3 mentions of Philo.
Anatolius of Alexandria, at least 1 mention of Philo.
Peter of Alexandria, at least 1 mention of Philo.
Eusebius himself, many mentions of Philo.

There are many, many more mentions of Philo from century IV, and Eusebius undoubtedly had his finger on the pulse of the eastern church, at least, so far as the popularity of Philo was concerned in his own day.

Eusebius was right; Philo was famous among many early Christians.

Ben.

Amaleq13

No, this recent tangent was about your apparent inability or refusal to read what was written in the posts to which you responded. You asked at least twice for something that had already been provided.

Confusing Philo's description of the Therapeutæ with Christians even though he explains why Philo might not have used "Christian" and the described behavior is, apparently, consistent with that of Christian ascetics does not him a "blatant liar". No, it just makes him mistaken and understandably so.

aa5874

The reason I call Eusebius a blatant liar is because I have isolated several cases of mis-leading and false information provided by Eusebius with respect to Philo and Josephus. Some of these cases I have already posted.

For example, Eusebius gave false and mis-leading information about the following:

• The death of Agrippa as written by Josephus in "Antiquities of the Jews"19.8.
  
• The reason for the execution of John the Baptist as recorded by Josehus in "Antiquities of the Jews" 18.5.
  
• A person called "James" in Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1.
  
• The Therapeutae as written by Philo in "The Contemplative Life".