mountainman

My detractors such as Jeffrey here like playing the conspiracy card. It is good value. The only problem is that Constantine, who is best decribed as a military supremacist, did not need to conspire with anyone. That the new testament is the output of imperial fraud in this instance does not require anything but absolute military power.

My detractors who in many cases are experienced textual critics display a marked lack of interest in the possible external (eg: political) assessment of the texts. That the holy mainstream writ was not meant to be questioned in a political sense may be your assumption (postulate), but this need not be the same for others.

In Biblical History one may magically suspend the real political and archaeological history from consideration of "things Early christian". But in the field of ancient history, no such suspension is possible.



Best wishes,


Pete Brown

mountainman

On the desk of Eusebius.
Hence the postulate.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Jeffrey Gibson

Right. And where do we find Grant saying in Rise of the Greeks what you claimed he did, and the eight or more references to priests of Asclepius in C's translation of book one Philostratus' Life of A, and the reference in VC 56 to an the execution, let alone to the execution of a person?

You'll excuse me for saying this, but in the light of your absolute inability to locate things you authoritatively claim are in certain places and/or to demonstrate/support the truth of your claims about these things, I'm not inclined to trust what you say above.

So where in particular within the texts on that desk can we find early Christians making the claims that S claimed they made?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

So far as I can see, not a single one of your detractors have done any such thing, assuming that by "playing the conspiracy card" one means explaining things by appeal to an organized effort on the part of a number of people to cover up a truth and/or foster a lie. So I'd be grateful if you could point out -- by adducing particular lines from particular posts --just where any of us have done so.

Jeffrey

spamandham

I'm not seeing it. But then, I'm not seeing why we would expect not to find artifacts from a persecuted sect either.

Possibly papyrus, possibly wooden artifacts, tombs with dateable remains, church timbers, etc.

I don't understand where this idea that Christianity was a tiny persecuted sect is coming from.

Jeffrey Gibson

How many "churches" -- i.e., buildings dedicated exclusively to Christian worship -- were there before Constantine? And where would you expect to find them?

Jeffrey

spamandham

I have no idea whether there were any. But if Christianity was wide spread and popular ~200 years prior to Constantine, it's an oddity that all we have is textual evidence from strictly Christian sources.

Jeffrey Gibson

But how popular -- and popular compared to what -- was it?

Jeffrey

Doug Shaver

Not if you're going to claim that any evidence against it must have been faked.

Amaleq13

You don't see how a small, despised or persecuted movement might be more interested in keeping a low profile than in leaving behind permanent markers of their existence?

The sort of permanent artifacts you expect typically come from having money and having stability. Neither of those appear to be true of Christianity until after it became accepted.

Expecting a 1st century papyrus to have survived does not appear to be reasonable and even less so given a small, persecuted sect as the creators.

What sort of "wooden artifacts"?

I don't think it is reasonable to expect tombs to explicitly identify the deceased's membership in a despised/persecuted sect. I would expect something subtle and possibly unidentifiable to anyone outside the sect.

Church timbers? What churches? Didn't they meet in homes and in secret?

I thought you were more familiar with the evidence than that. No wonder you have what seem to me unreasonable expectations.

The earliest external evidence is fairly consistent in describing Christianity as a small sect whose membership was generally considered to represent superstitious yokels and idiots.