Sheshbazzar

While it is likely that most Christians would have accepted the NT tale hook, line, and sinker, (as a significant number still do) It is hardly as likely that the Stotics, Epicureans, Platonists, and myrid other religious followers would have. It was stuffed down their throats with the point of the sword.

mountainman

Agreed Shesh. According to The Interpretation of Knowledge: NHC 11.1 an entire generation of heretics fled out of the cities to desert refuges, since they did not yet even believe that Jesus was alive, and that he was "nailed by the church for the church".

mountainman

Sorry Littlejohn , I did not type that correctly - I should have written ..... I reject the notion that nobody at all - especially the Gnostics - doubted the historicity of Jesus at Nicaea. In other words, IMO it is entirely reasonable to expect that a large number of people at that time doubted the historicity of Jesus, but were too intimidated by Constantine (and his army) to disagree with his preferred selection of Imperial Cult. Many simply acquiesced, others cashed in, others fled out of the cities. What we can be sure of is that some of them took up the manufacture of codices.

As far as I am concerned the "gnostics" are the authors and preservers of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" including the Nag Hammadi Codices (See the above reference to NHC 11.1.). They are the generation which witnessed the epoch of Constantine's military and religious and political supremacy between the years of 324 and 337 CE, and they are largely Greek literate Alexandrians. Their attitude to Jesus was demonstrably heretical. According to Robert M. Grant these authors made "severely conditoned responses to Jesus" and in general ... "usually these authors deny his humanity" .


As I see it at the moment the "gnostics" represented the non Christian Graeco-Roman "Universal Church" (ie: the pagan church, particularly at Alexandria) before Constantine became supreme. It included the "Sacred Assembly of the Priesthoods" at Alexandria, which had been supported and patronised by temples and shrines and coinage motifs from each and all the preceeding Roman Emperors. When c.326 CE the Draconian law was decreed that "Religious privileges are reserved for Christians", their entire series of traditional religious practices became unlawful and redundant overnight.

Toto

No one ever claimed that Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins had an incarnation on earth. That is the primary difference.

I have asked you not to casually throw in mocking references to Harry Potter or Bilbo Baggins. It trivializes the discussion. If you want to develop that thesis, you need to do a lot more work.

As I have tried to explain to you, the writers in the first century were not modern materialists. Their idea of "existence" was not ours. Most of them believed in the supernatural, in demons who ruled the air, in levels of heaven above the air. Some of them did not believe that Jesus "existed" in vulgar reality, because they believed his existence was in a higher realm. But these people were Christians who believed in Jesus. The anti-Christians, Jews and pagans like Julian, denigrated Jesus by describing him as a mere man, born of a prostitute/hairdresser.

You are the one presenting an argument - that there were some early heretics who thought that Jesus was a literary fiction, which you argue was invented in the 4th century. I disagree that these writings support that theory.

Are you trying to base your arguments on writings that were destroyed? How would you know what they said?

But you seem to have no idea what that really meant.

Not every remotely possible reading makes sense.

Ancients and modern people like to write fictional stories about real people.

Only if you don't really understand them.

Toto

There is absolutely no support for this idea. There was no such universal church in pagan times.

mountainman

I am using the term to describe the universal tolerance that permitted a diverse milieu of religions and cults to collegiately live together in some form of cooperative state, as it strongly suggested by the evidence of coins and temple inscriptions.

While it is true that there was sporadic persecution of the Jews by the ROman Emperors, and that Diocletian persecuted the Manichaeans, in general the Emperors as "Pontifex Maximus" were patronising and benevolent on the pagan cults and on the assembly of their priests. They retained the right to sponsor the cult of their own selection, and they did for centuries until Constantine tore down the temples and forbade their use.