wordy

Hope I don't come through as very alien to other fellow atheists but despite me atheists and almost hating anything organized religion I find the history of the bible very fascinating.

It is like a detective story, FBI-files not X-files. The real FBI files. A kind of forensic story.

Who where these people creating it. Why did it work despite being so sloppy handywork. Where they payed to do it or did they do it out of own invested faith?

Sometimes I entertain the notion that it is the best fraud in history. But that sounds too conspiratory, you know the style, Vatican having all evidence on how it was accomplished hidden in their archives. Too unlikely, somebody would whistle and tell the secret and smuggle out the manuscripts.

But the fervor of Catholics trying to discredit Dan Brown's book maybe show that it could be true.

Just me teasing.

It is even more interesting that a fiction on TV cause this crime is for real, they actually wrote that text. So if we only could get a hint on what they intended maybe we solve it. Was it all done by Constantine? The more times goes by that seems the best answer.

Roger Pearse

I'm afraid just asserting the contrary doesn't really make a difference. You appeal to the 'external sources', but these too are also full of bunk, on this thesis, which means that they too are useless. Does 0+0=1?

I'm sorry, but the idea that we can start by saying it's all rubbish and still retain anything except what our prejudices choose to approve is mistaken.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Doug Shaver

You're right. But presupposition can be inferred by observation.

Koyaanisqatsi

Except that you are the one asserting the contrary. Sifting fact from fiction is a normal course of any historian's job, so what you're suggesting is what, exactly? Just accept anything that claims to be "true" at face value? Why in the world would any historian, in particular, do such a profoundly stupid thing?

How so?

Useless? Upon what are you basing these black and white, blanket statements? Paul Bunyon stories are not "useless" just because they're fictional. Ancient mythologies are not "useless" just because they are based on a tiny grain of truth and the rest is fictional.

I'm sorry, but then the logical alternative is to take every single thing ever written at face value, which means Stephen King is a non-fiction writer, since nowhere in any of his books does he ever say, "This is fiction."

Your simplistic black/white sophistry is dismissed.

wordy

The most practical approach is to see Constantin as the main factor in making christian faith survive. Without his needs there would most likely has been no dominance of x.

Would we really have had a better life if he had adopted polytheism? Would he had won the wars? How would polytheism been able to measure up to Islam?

Maybe all of us would have been muslims now without Constantine?

Roger Pearse

You may find it helpful to reread what I wrote. Perhaps it would help if I repeated it.

The main problem in dealing with ancient history is us; our prejudices, our expectations. It is easy enough to write a history of the past by simply calling whatever we find inconvenient a 'lie', 'interpolation', 'forgery' or indeed rather less loaded terms which amount to the same thing. The difficulty is how to avoid doing this. I myself don't want to read such 'histories'. I want the facts.

When we see (usually uneducated) people saying that history is all full of errors and bias, and none of it can be accepted apart from some bits about which they are invariably vague, I find that there is no practical difference in their minds between this and 'history is mostly bunk.' In short, it seems that such a position is merely a set of words around obscurantism, whatever the wishes of the speaker. Vague talk about 'needing to examine the evidence' mean nothing without details on how this works; and the thrust and point of all these comments is to ignore data.

The problem that we find with all this is not that there are not elements which are true -- people are indeed often liars when guns, girls and gold are involved --, but that we cannot approach history like this and get anywhere doing so. There is no statement in the historical record that cannot be disposed of by these means. We can *always* imagine a reason why some bit of testimony might be bogus.

This is why we can never do so. If we do, what happens is that we construct a story about the past, decorated with a selection of bits of data from the past which we choose to accept and omitting equally well-evidenced bits of data which we choose to reject on grounds that we choose not to raise against other data.

In short, we really do have to start with the data, not with a prejudice against it. We have to have an objective reason to reject its testimony, not merely easy but vague assertions that "all atheists / jews / christians / pagans / romans / greeks / americans / etc are liars so we can't trust anything they say" .

What we have to do first, in my amateur opinion, is to let the data speak. Assemble all the relevant data that is transmitted from the past. See what it says, on the basis that all of it is true. Then, and only then, we will be able to see inconsistencies; and then, and only then, we might formulate theories as to how these eddies in the data stream come about.

For instance if we do this exercise on the Council of Nicaea, we come across such an 'eddy'. Most of the writers tell us that the council was about the homoousion, and also harmonised the date of Easter. But Eusebius of Caesarea (who is writing at the time) says that it was about Easter, and incidentally about the homoousion. Which is right? Is someone lying? Or did the perception of events change over the succeeding century? (I'm not going to offer opinions on this -- my point is to illustrate what NOT to do). The inconsistencies are probably often caused by the shadow on events of bits of data that did not reach us, and which we do not know about. Thus we can learn more where events do not tell a neatly arranged story than sometimes when they do.

Alternatively we can just say (e.g.) "all Americans are liars" and invent our own history of how the USA invaded Iraq in order to provide combat training in killing people for its brutal and undertrained soldiers. Hey, we all *know* that's true... don't we? (I hear such stories often enough <sigh>) But every such misrepresentation, every clever lie, is perpetrated by selection and omission, led by an agenda.

Let's keep the agendas out of it, keep the theories away from the data, and distinguish clearly between the two. This is not the best way to do history; merely the only way, as far as I can tell. Those who do it differently, however valuable their religious position, only write rhetoric.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

The digression into Islam and Catholicism has been split off here

Clouseau

You're right. Can be.

mountainman

This is what the propaganda (published in the 4th century)
might permit you to infer.

Do you think he was "sent into the region" down a time tunnel?

Where is there one skerrick like shred of evidence that there
was anything whatsoever "christian" on planet earth before
the rise of Constantine, let alone that "Paul may have been
an historical operative in the Roman literature region"?

Just one little bit of objective evidence, that's all.